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0224097768
| 9780224097765
| 0224097768
| 4.12
| 163
| Apr 02, 2015
| Jan 01, 1800
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it was amazing
| That was ages ago, six months at least or perhaps more. I am losing track. There is so little to hold on to at the centre and so many tangled threa That was ages ago, six months at least or perhaps more. I am losing track. There is so little to hold on to at the centre and so many tangled threads stretching out in all directions. I follow one thread and it breaks. I follow another and it leads into a precarious landscape where there are no instructions, no signposts. I make contact with strangers. I try to be polite and hope they will like me enough to answer my questions. A brilliantly idiosyncratic autobiographical exploration of the life John Craske (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cr...) - the Norfolk based early 20th Century fisherman turned naïve artist and embroider of coastal scenes. It is written in a very similar style to her next book – “Time Song: Searching for Doggerland” – and while that was infused with the absence of her late husband, this is written in the period leading up to and immediately beyond his unexpected death. And like that book it is as much about the life of Craske and those around him (particularly his sponsorship and championing by the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover/partner the poet Valentine) as it is about her journeys to research him, journeys which take her around (mainly North and mid-West) Norfolk and draw her into side-quests often based on snippets of tangential information divulged by those who can tell her something of Craske (she becomes intrigued for example by the story of Einstein’s famous stay on Roughton Heath). Ostensibly chapters alternate between dates in the past and those in the present of the author’s quest but I must admit I only worked this out late on in the book – the author’s husband rightly remarking on “the oddness of the book's shape; he said he liked the way that time shifted through the chapters, the past and the present jostling together as if there was nothing to separate them.“ It also becomes clear, to the author as much as to the reader, that there is a metafictional aspect to the construction of this book about a man famous for his coastal tapestries: I kept seeing it in terms of an embroidered tapestry and that made il possible for me to jump to different sections and fill them in, before returning to the central line of my story. I had written the three chapters on einstein quite early on; they stood together as a little group and I toned them from place to place, looking for where they might best fit. Overall a hugely enjoyable and deeply intelligent book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 04, 2024
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Oct 06, 2024
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Oct 06, 2024
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Hardcover
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1447208234
| 9781447208235
| 1447208234
| 4.22
| 112
| Oct 03, 2024
| Oct 03, 2024
|
really liked it
| ‘So what are you writing about, love, in your book?’ Edie said. ‘I’m writing about my early life mainly–teens and twenties. That and my mother, you ‘So what are you writing about, love, in your book?’ Edie said. ‘I’m writing about my early life mainly–teens and twenties. That and my mother, you know. It’s really since she died,’ I said, ‘and going through all her stuff . . .’ ‘Oh, that’s so touching,’ she said, ‘it must bring memories flooding back.’ ‘Yes and no,’ I said, not ready to go into it. ‘She sounds such a remarkable person.’ ‘She really was,’ I said. ‘I wonder how much you actually remember, from so long ago,’ Edie said. ‘David’s got an amazing memory,’ said Richard, ‘as you know.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about all this. The teenage stuff is more like writing a novel. I remember places, and experiences, very clearly, but they’re stills, you know, rather than clips. Or GIFs perhaps, sometimes–a head turns, a hand comes down, but you never see what comes next, it just does it again. Besides that, of course, there’s anecdotes, things I’ve been told, that I know I did, even if I can’t really remember them. And no one recalls more than a few words anyone actually said fifty years ago. You just have to make that up.’ ‘A bit of improv,’ said Ken. ‘Because you did write about your acting career, didn’t you, in your first book?’ Edie said, holding my eye to conceal her uncertainty. ‘Well, that was a more general book, about experimental theatre in the Seventies and Eighties–I don’t want to go there ever again. What I’m writing now is more about my personal life–things I really didn’t want to talk about before. I want to write about falling in love.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ said Ken, and Richard gave us an interesting smile as he absorbed the idea. ‘And I want to write about being like I am, but never knowing much about where I came from.’ Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize in 2004 with his fourth novel “The Line of Beauty”, narrowly beating David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”. This is his only his seventh novel and the first I have read although I am aware of his reputation – for novels which explore British gay history (including changing societal attitudes) via mainly male characters who are either directly privileged (or often who come into the circle of the privileged) written in a crystalline prose. And this novel – potentially his last – fits very much into that tradition, although with one main exception – his main protagonist David Win who tells the story in first person recollection, is of mixed English Burmese descent. This choice and the use of his narrator to explore race is something of a departure from an author who has previously I think been known for writing about a milieu and societal position with which he is familiar, but now chooses to add a first party exploration of racial discrimination. Hollinghurst himself said in a Bookseller interview that “while it seemed to me very fascinating and urgent to imagine life from the viewpoint of someone moving through the world I’ve moved in, but set apart by their race, I saw that the last thing everybody wanted was some elderly white bloke telling people of colour what they think” and that he saw a biracial narrator and the choice of a Burmese heritage to add a colonial aspect to the novel as a solution …. I think it is not one that everyone will agree with The book opens with a framing chapter – when David, now an elderly but famous actor learns of the death of Mark Hadlow “ethical businessman, a major philanthropist”, father of Giles the notorious minister for Brexit, but also as David’s husband Richard points out “the father you never had”, but other than that is told in a series of what are in effect some thirty-something vignettes from David’s life, beginning from when he is thirteen, a Hadlow scholar at a boarding school, travelling to meet his benefactors at a family farm, together with the bullying Giles (a contemporary at school) and continuing past David’s death to the death of David’s own mother (his father always something of a mystery to him – David seemingly the product of an affair when his mother was working in Burma pre independence). Key episodes include: a Devon holiday which David spends with his dressmaker mother and her separated and relatively well-off friend Mrs Croft – the reader already expecting she is her mother’s lesbian lover while David is too distracted by the male flesh on show at the beach and by an Italian waiter at the rather down at heel hotel; school year interactions including with Giles; his time at (inevitably) Oxford – which ends in rather abrupt failure in his finals; his time in an experimental radical left-wing touring theatre troupe (part funded via his efforts by the Hadlow’s); his first serious relationship – with Chris a Council Officer; a meeting with an elderly actor which leads to a rather unexpected sexual act; an affair with another actor Hector – a black man who makes David see that the racial prejudice and microaggressions he faces rather pale compared to Hector’s live experience; a school reunion; the death of his mother’s now long acknowledged lover (a relationship that cut her off from the rest of her family); a book festival where his interlocutor is Richard (who then becomes his lover) …….. and all of this against the backdrop of his enduring relationship with Mark Hadlow (and his wife Cara) and his more sporadic and troubled one with Giles. There was much I liked about the book. One can see why the author spends years writing his books – as there is a precision to the prose and a weighting to the writing which I would call old fashioned – but only in the sense that it is rare to see it in contemporary literary fiction. The way in which the novel moves from what starts as a rather cliched boarding school novel and then an equally cliched coming-of-age account, to its real strength – an examination of ageing. A key theme to the novel is a Latin legend on a sundial SENSIM SINE SENSU which Richard translates from Cicero as “slowly, without sensing it, we grow old”.’ I was less keen on some other aspects: For an author that I thought by reputation was good at indirectly exploring politics – his Booker winning book partially an account of the Thatcher years, Giles rarely rises above Conservative caricature – for example at one stage he is portrayed as a tone-deaf and hopelessly disinterested Arts Minister and a scene where he attends an event where David reads alongside an orchestral accompaniment only to leave early and drown out the performance with the sound of his helicopter taking off for Brussels seems drawn from crude satirical TV. I would also say that the world of Boarding schools, Oxford and theatre (moving over time from eager left wingers to establishment luvvies) are not ones I really enjoy reading about. And the framing device which both ends and encompasses the novel (and which I have seen elsewhere described as a “twist”) seemed rather obvious and not really necessary to me. But overall I can understand the regard in which the novel is held – and would not be surprised or disappointed to see this – possibly his valedictory novel – gain some prize recognition including a third Booker longlisting, albeit its old fashioned nature and the issue of its protagonist would make me surprised to see it go further. My thanks to Picador, Pam Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley Richard knows of course that I’ve been writing another book – though not exactly what it is. I seem to need some secrecy, even from him; and no doubt I’m wary of his editorial eye. If I’m home in the day I climb up here under the Velux and close the door, but I’m aware on and off, when he crosses the room or takes a call from one of his authors, of Richard at work in the room below. He’s just started editing a book on the Burmese junta–a curious choice, it seems to me, and clearly very slow work for him. He has tried to involve me by asking if I’ll check the proper names, but I feel the author, who has actually spent twelve years in the country, is much more likely than me to know the right forms....more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 21, 2024
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Sep 23, 2024
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Sep 27, 2024
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Hardcover
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0571365469
| 9780571365463
| 0571365469
| 4.35
| 6,793
| Sep 24, 2024
| Sep 24, 2024
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really liked it
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My journey with Sally Rooney is complex. I did not really enjoy “Conversations With Friends” - while I really liked the France’s character I did not My journey with Sally Rooney is complex. I did not really enjoy “Conversations With Friends” - while I really liked the France’s character I did not appreciate what I saw as the superficiality of the other characters and their privileged, directionless lives. But overall I found it (at the time) “an interesting debut by a young author writing with a fresh new voice about a young character experiencing a very old story (a woman having an affair with an older married man).” I approached “Normal People” with scepticism, reading it on publication day but more to complete the 2018 Man Booker longlist. However, and almost despite myself I found myself drawn into a novel I called at the time “Jane Austen for the millennial generation.” and just as Connell observed of Emma “It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is – literature moves him.” - I concluded my review “And there it is – this book moved me.” As a result, I was front of the queue at Waterstones Piccadilly for the pre-launch reading and in person book signing for “Beautiful World”. As well as enjoying hearing from the author and a brief chat with her and then watching online the fascinating Southbank interview the next day - I really enjoyed the meta fictional way in which Alice and Eileen represented (as I saw it) alternate Sally Rooney’s - although as with all her novels I found myself at a uncomprehending generational distance from the political beliefs of the characters (and the author). So now onto Intermezzo. Due to work commitments I could not this time make the launch event (or watch the Southbank interview the next day) but I had the book delivered on publication day and enjoyed reading it over the next few days. I also read the transcript (in the New Statesman) of her pre publication conversation with Fintan O’Toole in Dublin. A few thoughts on a book which is already (and will be) widely reviewed elsewhere. A key quote from the O’Toole conversation for me was when Rooney said (of the symmetrical but opposite age differences between Peter/Naomi and Ivan/Margaret which provide much of the narrative tension in the novel): “I think there's a social friction there, and it's not just age differences. When I look at my work, what stands out is that I'm persistently interested in power imbalances or social imbalances: that can be class divisions, or it could be age, it could be wealth or an imbalance in terms of gendered power, which is common in heterosexual relationships. What I'm really interested in is trying to write about characters who are in relationships that are very important to them, but which are characterised by a state of disequilibrium in some way.” – as I think that gets to the heart of most of Rooney’s writing and is also how I see this book in character terms as a more direct successor to “Conversations with Friends” and “Normal People” (with “Beautiful World Where Are You” more of an outlier). However this is much more of a discontinuity to her previous work in the primary focus being on male protagonists (with the female characters not really fleshed out as well). I would say her success her is mixed. The writing of male characters seemed to me as a meal reader much more natural than is often said by female readers of male authors writing female characters – indeed she even seemed to capture male interiority (or that of those I know best) better than many male authors trying to write distinctively male books. Peter was a complex character and I liked the way in which Rooney explored male depression and even suicide through him. Ivan was perhaps less convincing - his story arc from geeky and robotic Incel to (semi-)accomplished lover of an attractive ten year old woman did not seem plausible – although at least it was written by a female author as in the hands of a young male author of the same age it would have seemed like some form of Javier Marias style fantasy-fulfilment (Marias being overly keen on writing older intellectual men who are irresistible to younger female students). And also in the writing style – including the switch between Peter and Ivan/Margaret’s narration. Odd sentence choice Rooney has the habit of using – which is most prominent in the rather staccato steam of consciousness attempt at capturing Peter with the unfortunate result of making him sound at times like Yoda trying to imitate Joyce. And I was surprised at how awkward the narrative was occasionally for someone who is normally so gifted a storyteller – most awkwardly when Ivan goes to stay at his father’s “empty” house given we have been set up, with sitcom levels of preparation, for the fact that it will of course not be empty and that Peter and Ivan’s hitherto separate narrative streams will collide. And while the level of artificiality and set up is bad enough – Ivan’s “Everything has gone to plan, and in just a few minutes, he will arrive home, to his dad’s house, with the dog’s various accoutrements, ready to get settled in” was close to unforgiveable in its clumsy foreshadowing of things in fact not going to plan – although at least he did have the novel’s real star (Alexei) with him. And yet ………. as I always seem to come back to with Rooney, while this did not move me as much as “Normal People” it did keep me engaged and interested for well over 400 pages. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 26, 2024
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Sep 28, 2024
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Sep 26, 2024
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Hardcover
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0593655184
| 9780593655184
| 0593655184
| 4.43
| 607
| Jan 09, 2024
| Jan 09, 2024
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really liked it
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This book was a Finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing (the original non-fiction part of the Prize – the Fiction prize, which I foll
This book was a Finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing (the original non-fiction part of the Prize – the Fiction prize, which I follow closely, being a more recent addition) and my thanks to the Orwell Prize for sending me this book as part of a giveaway ahead of the Winner announcement. It is a very detailed account of the first year of Russian invasion of Ukraine, by a Ukranian born Wall Steet Journal foreign-affairs correspondent turned Pulitzer finalist – who spent the year at the various frontlines of the resulting war. It starts really strongly but does appear to lose its way somewhat and get bogged down from say 40% onwards – but that of course simply reflects the nature of the conflict once the Russians initial attack was checked. Nevertheless I found this an invaluable read ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 20, 2024
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Sep 24, 2024
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Sep 26, 2024
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Hardcover
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1473563372
| 9781473563377
| B07Q2G4ZWD
| 3.98
| 415
| unknown
| Jun 11, 2020
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it was ok
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This is a book that feels unbalanced – only around 40% on VDB’s rise and cycling successes and the rest on his long fall; and it is hard to disagree w
This is a book that feels unbalanced – only around 40% on VDB’s rise and cycling successes and the rest on his long fall; and it is hard to disagree with the reviews of the Café Podium Book Corner (https://www.podiumcafe.com/book-corne...) and its conclusion that “McGrath gets to have his cake and eat it, complaining about the tabloid culture that kept Vandenbroucke in the headlines even when he was off the bike while exhuming his rotting corpse and dissecting his private life”. I was also unimpressed by a back cover that reads: “the Belgian won most of cycling’s most prestigious races, including Liege Bastogne Liege and Paris-Nice” – which would be much more accurate were the words “most of cycling’s most prestigious races, including” deleted (as otherwise VDB won a series of semi-classics and 2 Vuelta Stages) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 19, 2024
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Sep 20, 2024
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Sep 26, 2024
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ebook
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1916484999
| 9781916484993
| 4.00
| 1
| unknown
| Jul 2024
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really liked it
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The annual (contemporary) (and Red coloured) Road Books are the professional road cycling Wisden or English language Wielerjaarboek, and continue to b
The annual (contemporary) (and Red coloured) Road Books are the professional road cycling Wisden or English language Wielerjaarboek, and continue to build into an invaluable library for future reference and reminiscences. Now the same group have begun a Blue Series – of retrospective books in the same format but looking back on past professional cycling seasons. The first rather predictably was 1989 – but the second was a more interesting choice: 2011 – the year of: Phillip Gilbert’s Ardennes Triple Crown (well Quadruple as is started in Fleche Brabanconne); Cancellara’s dramatic victory in the GPE3 and even more dramatic collapse on the approach to the Muur in the RvV leading to Nick Nuyens astonishing win; Mark Cavendish’s momentous World Championship win with the British controlling the race for all but the final K or so; Cadel Evans Tour victory; two other Grand Tours entirely ruined by drugs – with the later rescinded victories of Contador and Cobo; and a series of unlikely classic winners (Matt Goss, Johan Van Summeren and Oliver Zaugg). It makes for an interesting read – although I would have preferred a longer Introduction and to have heard from riders like Gilbert, Cavendish and Nuyens (plus perhaps also Cancellara and the two Schleck brothers – defeated both in Liege and the Tour) – as it is we get Froome and (at shorter length) Evans and van Summeren. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 16, 2024
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Sep 26, 2024
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Sep 23, 2024
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Hardcover
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1804991961
| 9781804991961
| 1804991961
| 4.24
| 1,219
| Jun 01, 2023
| May 2024
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really liked it
| We are all citizens of the Earth: an ocean world. Whether we choose to acknowledge the blue machine or not, it dominates the planet, regulating how We are all citizens of the Earth: an ocean world. Whether we choose to acknowledge the blue machine or not, it dominates the planet, regulating how energy and atoms flow around the globe, and setting the scene for everything else. This great liquid engine is majestic and intricate, dynamic and interconnected, with a vast array of life rippling through its swirling innards is far larger than us, and the great rules of ocean physics do not bend to human will. We can pretend to live our lives in spite of the ocean, or we can choose to understand and work with it, and thereby benefit from the natural processes that are in any case out of our direct control. They bring richness and variety, as well a surprises and a degree of unpredictability. That is the beauty of the blue machine. An entertaining and informative guide to the world’s oceans – and their influence on the world – by a physicist (having by coincidence sat NatSci at my alma mater – Churchill College Cambridge) and Oceanographer. The book for me was particularly strong and interesting on the more physical sections – around salinity, temperature and about the influence of the earth’s spin and of its landmasses (and its deep ocean basins which basically overspill onto the shallow continental plates) on ocean flow (as well as the impacts of water density resulting from the first two factors). It is particularly good at explaining the long timescales over which some resulting currents operate and the very slow process for ocean mixing – leading to almost permanent layers of very different types of water. If I had a reservation it relates to the author’s obsession with Hawaiian traditional canoeing culture but I found it very easy to skip these sections (although I think the author would say they are crucial to us being in touch with the ocean). Finally I would recommend the book to anyone who enjoyed Richard Powers Booker longlisted “Blue Machine” as it makes a perfect non-fiction companion. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 08, 2024
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Sep 10, 2024
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Sep 13, 2024
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Paperback
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0241665582
| 9780241665589
| 0241665582
| 4.38
| 55
| Oct 31, 2024
| Nov 05, 2024
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it was amazing
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Ali Smith has become I would say something of a literary national treasure – her 2-in-1 published-in- two-orders novel 2014 “How To Be Both” swept not just the Women’s Prize but the Goldsmith Prize and the novel award in the Costa Prize (the latter two prizes generally seen as at opposite ends of the literary prize experimental/popular spectrum). It was one of her four books shortlisted for the Booker Prize together with Hotel World (2001), “The Accidental” (2005), and “Autumn” (2017). The latter marked the apparent end of her willingness to enter the Booker (leaving her stranded one behind Beryl Bainbridge on shortlistings without winning) but was also the first in her brilliant almost real time published state of the nation Seasonal Quartet – the last of which “Summer” very deservedly and appropriately won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2021. She subsequently published the aptly named “Companion Piece” (2022) as a Covid/lockdown continuation of the approach and themes of the quartet. This is her latest novel and has many tropes that will be familiar to those who are like me fans of her writing: The copious use of wordplay – homonyms, variations on a word, words with multiple meanings (and even here words with letters that start to disappear). Most noticeably and while the book’s blurb tells us correctly that “Gliff” is a “Scottish/northern word for a shock, a fright, a transient moment, a glance or sudden glimpse” – an entire chapter of the book reveals a wide range of alternative meanings with a later chapter then using an Urban Dictionary definition of “a substitute word for any word”(which I think may come from its apparent use in vocabulary aptitude tests in place of “____”) An innovative publication approach. This time we are told that “Gliff” contains a hidden story which will only emerge in “Glyph”(a signifying mark – as in ‘hieroglyph’ a novel to be published in 2025 – with the two novels said to belong to each other (that idea of what belonging or ownership means being one of the very things this novel explores – in particular in the concept of human/animal relations) The trademark slightly fey young child – here the narrator Bri(ar)’s younger sister Rose but also Briar themselves. Literary and artistic references – I have spoken in the past about Smith’s work being something of a literary/art palimpsest (something Smith has included in previous works such as “How to Be Both”). Here literary references include most noticeable Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (although here the text Brave New World is literally erased in the text rather than covered over), Max Frisch’s novella “Man in the Holocene”, the horse (and horse and lion) paintings of the 18th century painter George Stubbs and the fairy tale Briar Rose as well as apparent references to legends of fairies. Political themes – typically written from a liberal/left wing, green viewpoint. Here Smith rails (perhaps that is an exaggeration given the lightness of her writing) against: smart phones (in what is in many respect a near and sometimes far future dystopian novel - the educators worn by other children seem chillingly little different in function or potential risk and impact from today’s smart watches); exploitative capitalism in both the service industries and in factories; environmental degradation (the most dangerous factories are based around extracting batteries from devices); the vacuum at the heart of rampant and performative consumerism – the real well-off in the society are so inert in their luxury as to be little distinguishable from still-life; industrial-agriculture and much more. I must admit that as with some of her other writing some of this went a little far for me – for example when Briar’s mother rails against weedkillers (for which she once wrote advertising copy) saying “Things sometimes need to be removed or controlled so people can grow things like food. But what I think now is this. For centuries we worked out how to do that in all weathers, without using chemical poisons. So it's not new work to us as a species.” - I was left wondering how someone could read history and yet miss the frequent appearance of famines. In terms of brief plot the book is set in, as I have said a near-future, country which to me seems a lot like England/Scotland. It opens with Bri (who when asked if they are male or female – and this in a society obsessed with measurement and recording and putting people in boxes, says “yes”) and Rose and thier mother’s partner Leif leaving their mother in a luxury hotel where she is surreptitiously covering the work of her ill sister. But when they return and find their home outlined with red paint (a marking which seems to convey some form of a pariah status of people who are “unverified” Uvs – for either their speaking of taboos or their unwillingness to participate in the digitised surveillance society which Bri’s Mum – a believer in reading and learning – resists) they flee. Shortly after their camper van is also outlined in red and Leif leaves them in a deserted safe house while he attempts to get their mother and avoid being placed in some form of adult retraining centre. From there they eventually befriend a set of fellow outcasts living in an old school – St Saccobanda’s Sixth Form college (later a passage tells a tale of a horse headed daughter called Saccobanda) but more importantly before that they buy/rescue/steal an abattoir bound horse – a grey gelding (from his size) pony that Rose calls Gliff (although whether you can name a horse is a subject of some discussion - although as an aside the correct answer “Yes, normally a formal registered and informal stable name, but never change the informal name as it is really bad luck” is not given). The story is effectively told by Bri some years later. Somehow they have gone inside society with an assumed identity and are working as a supervisor in a retraining factory, but an encounter with one of the workers (who claims to have known her sister in an organisation which for me seemed to have a potential link via the campion flower to Bri’s mother) brings back the past. Now I have to say that any book with a grey gelding pony and its centre (and its inside cover) is by default worth five stars already but I think the book works for the non-horse lover (although it may be a book which makes you want to shut the book and at least spend some time with a horse, and if so do not resist the temptation) – but so is any book written by Ali Smith. And this is an intriguing novel if perhaps elusive – there is limited world building and little closure – and I am already looking forward to Glyph to see how much of what is unclear in this novel is revealed. My thanks to Hamish Hamilton, Penguin General UK for an ARC via NetGalley ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 11, 2024
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Sep 13, 2024
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Sep 11, 2024
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Paperback
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1405962429
| 9781405962421
| B0CV813CTN
| 3.92
| 50
| unknown
| Nov 07, 2024
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really liked it
| Phyl chewed on her pencil and thought about it. She couldn’t tell whether or not Rashida was being entirely serious. But she added a third item to Phyl chewed on her pencil and thought about it. She couldn’t tell whether or not Rashida was being entirely serious. But she added a third item to the list in her notebook anyway, so that her options as a fledgling writer now consisted of: I have previously read Coe’s “What A Carve Up” (1994) and its part sequel “Number 11” (2015) – both drawing on English Farce and more unusually horror B-movies for a social satire on English society and politics; as well as his chocolate factory-based family based social history of English post war society “Bournville”. He is also well known for his (not read by me) satirical/political trilogy “The Rotters Club” (2001), “The Closed Circle” (2004) and then the much later “Middle England” (2018) which revisited the characters from the first two novels as a way of examining British public and political life over some 8 years leading up to, through and in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum. And this his latest and I think 15th or so novel draws on many similar ideas. Rather than B-movie influences it draws on three literary tropes/genres (cosy crime – think Richard Osman, dark academia - think Secret History and autofiction) but in a very explicit way. And the satirical and examination of British political life is set over a much shorter period – in essence the 49 days of the disastrous Liz Truss Prime Ministerial reign (an early scene in the second part of the novel takes place in a “well preserved 17th century in which still [bears] its original name – The Fresh Lettuce” – itself an example of the way in which the novel mixes both obvious satire with a deeper level of examination of the British political body). And although I say that the novel focuses on those 49 days both Coe and one of his key characters Christopher Swann, a slightly obsessive blogger, focus their attention more widely, on the long road to power which the US/UK National Conservative movement has taken to power culminating (if that is the word) in the Trump/Truss pairing. After a brief cameo appearance by a detective pursuing a suspect on a train to the annoying (and to any fellow commuters sadly familiar) soundtrack of “See It. Say It. Sorted” (which then gives the book its three main sections which match its three genres), the book opens with its main character being Phyl back from University and living, at something of a loose end, with her parents in their vicarage (her mother Joanne a Vicar). The family is visited by Swann – a Cambridge University friend of Joanne – who is on his way to a TrueCon convention and brings with him his adopted daughter Rashida. Joanne and Christopher’s conversation turns to their University days – Emeric Coutts a Philosophy professor who ran some infamous right-wing salons and later influenced Thatcherism, a fellow student Roger Wagstaff who influenced by those now leads the TrueCon movement and his obsessive female sidekick (then and now decades later) Rebecca Wood, a mutual Brian friend recently deceased of cancer who has written a memoir of their time. Phyl meanwhile decides for want of any alternative short term career plans to write a novel and inspired by Rashida thinks of three different possible genres. And the novel then unfolds in three parts using both the British Transport mantra and the three genres. Part One: See It: is “Murder at Wetherby Pond: A Cosy Crime Mystery” telling off Christopher’s trip to the conference (narrowly avoiding an accident en route) and his rather feisty interactions with the host – Randolph Early of Wetherby – as well as Roger and Rebecca who are only too aware of his hostility to their movement at their exact moment of triumph – their set piece speaker even being unable to attend as her has been made Chancellor of the Exchequer. The speaker’s place is taken unconventionally by Richard Wilkes – a Professor of Literature at an Italian University, invited as he has dedicated much of his career to posthumously building the reputation of Peter Cockerill a a young experimental novelist with decided right wing and proto national conservative leanings (and who committed suicide shortly after an appearance at one of the salons in the 1980s). When a murder occurs with an apparent clue “r 8/2” there are a number of suspects all of whom are interviewed by the detective from the prologue. We then get Part Two: Say It “The Shadow Chamber: A Dark Academia” – Brian’s memoirs which the detective reads for evidence and which reveal much more of what went on in 1980s Cambridge; before Phyl and Rashida take up the story in Part Three Sorted: “Reborn: An Exercise in Autofiction” (one writing in first person and one in third person and arguing about the most appropriate autofiction form) and take up back to the arrest that opens the book – before an Epilogue gives us a new metafictional perspective on what we have been reading. Overall, I found the book very strong. The change of literary styles makes the book always entertaining, as well as themselves being a nice satire on (in I would say more Parts 1 and 3) styles that increasingly dominate fiction sales – as an aside Part 2 was in this respect a misstep, the Dark Academia theme in this case more adapted to fit the story than the story written through a pre-established genre. The story is also engaging – the characters are interesting, the plot is lively and the different periods (1980s Cambridge – a few years earlier than when I went there and in a considerably more traditional college; and contemporary England) are both well conveyed. And the book uses Coe’s rather over the top style rather neatly. The coincidences which drive the investigation (2/8 has at least two obvious meanings and one which only emerges a lot later; four people near the murder have the initials RW) feel amusingly absurd rather than ridiculous, and the political message underneath is a serious one particularly as the events set out in the novel are in no way more ridiculous or less believable than the 49 days they actually portray when extreme free market liberalism fell spectacularly foul of the free markets (just as supposedly working class socialism has lost all connection to the working class) but their consequences only too real. And as a result this is my favourite of the author’s books I have read and is recommended. My thanks to Yazmeen Akhtar of Penguin UK for a hardcopy ARC (and via NetGalley) ...more |
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0008618925
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it was amazing
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Eley Williams brilliant debut short story collection “Attrib.” was the Winner of the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize (for which I was a judge) an
Eley Williams brilliant debut short story collection “Attrib.” was the Winner of the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize (for which I was a judge) and included in the Guardian as my Book of the Year for 2017 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...). It subsequently went on to win the James Tait Prize - Britain's longest running literary prize and its first ever short story winner. Her debut novel – “Liar’s Dictionary” – I described in my review as Williams’ Wonderfully Whimsical Wordsmithery. And since then she has been recognised as one of the 20 writers on the prestigious decennial Granta Best Young British Novelists lists – and the story she then submitted for the subsequent Granta issue “Rostrum” (ostensibly about a woman failing to enter an office building and for me reminiscent of “Alighting” in her earlier collection) is one of 19 stories in this new short story collection (typically of around the 8-12 page length, the shortest 6 the longest 18). “Sonant” about a sound editor working on canned laughter equally evoked for me the Foley Artist of the titular story in “Attrib.” as did, to a lesser extent, “Cuvier’s Feather” about a Courtroom artist. And more generally the collection is very much in the tradition of both “Attrib.” and “Liar’s Dictionary” – lexicographical literature (unusual names, definitions, wordplay all abound) with interior stories (normally they take place almost entirely in the mind of the first or third party protagonist) with a sense of pathos and occasional hidden menace. Dialogue is rare or typically absent – one of the main stories about communication “Words of Affirmation” (taken from the Five Love Languages) a husband re-opens communication with his wife, in a marriage which has become devoid of love, by way of the search history on his laptop. If the collection lacks anything I think it is the sheer beauty of “Attrib.”’s “Smote” – with the two most impactful stories being “Message” about a failed marriage proposal via light aircraft writing and “Squared Circle” about wrestler who every year rings another older and now dying wrestler on the anniversary of the epoch defining (or given its faked - epoch defined) fight between them. But overall, Williams remains one of my favourite writers – and the real impact of her stories is in the cumulative power of reading them. ...more |
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it was amazing
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Review to follow.
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1787331741
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really liked it
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Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize On a second read this was again a perfect combination of thought provoking and enjoyable with the single best nar Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize On a second read this was again a perfect combination of thought provoking and enjoyable with the single best narrator on the longlist. I enjoyed the many links to other books – as well as scriptural references, Francophone setting and extractive multinationals, I noted: The book opens with a discussion on addiction coming from Neanderthal genes – Wandering Stars is almost entirely about addiction (in that case though due to external circumstances). Also both novels take their titles from songs - by The Movies and Portishead respectively. It also opens with an imagined image of a man touching a match to a cigarette – like the front cover of This Strange Eventful History. Serge’s family are now rootless ex French Algerians – again reminiscent of the family in This Strange Eventful History. Bruno also spends some time discussing how it is that ancient Polynesians navigated over 1000s of miles without a method clear to modern science – the passages are almost exactly duplicated in some of Evie’s thoughts in Playground. Lucien is questioned by Sadie about the origins of his family home (which he is unclear on) – and while this goes back 100s of years it reminded me of Isabel’s family home in Safekeep. Bruno’s family were almost all killed in Nazi camps – like Eva in Safekeep. One of Bruno’s formative experiences is finding a dead body of a soldier – which reminded me of the opening chapter of Held. ORIGINAL REVIEW Because of his exposure to the kerosene, at the outward periphery of each of his two eyes, Bruno’s vision periodically degraded in a vertical line. The line quavered as if a zipper had riven the seen world at this outer periphery, riven it and then sewn it back up, but unevenly, and the living parts of the riven world were vibrating, sutured badly, and leaking something from under the sutures—an unseen, untouched absolute. It was at the quavering edges of his vision, he told them, that the truth of the seen and unseen was attempting to break through, to communicate, to coalesce. A critical point, as a terminology of chemistry, he summarized, was that moment when gasses and solids had the same valence. Perhaps the two trembling seams at the edges of his vision were the destabilized place where two worlds were reaching equilibrium, attempting to find balance where each did not annihilate the other. He regarded this tremble as pertaining to the riddle of history, and to a dream of forging a future that did not negate the past, a dream that honored reality without occluding its own verso, its counter-reality. Jean-Patrick Manchette (French crime novelist) meets David Reich (ancient human population geneticist) with a backdrop of post Marxist radicalism and to a soundtrack of Daft Punk (and Serge/Charlotte Gainsbourg). I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2024 Booker Prize – and with reading it completed the longlist (on 6th August – 6 days ahead of 2023, but a week after 2022 when I managed to complete the longlist by end July – the announcement was 4 days earlier that year). Rachel Kushner has previously published 3 novels – of which I have only read the last – Mars Room, eventually shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize (and one of the very few potentially predictable novels on what was the oddest of longlists), a deeply researched and heartfelt but also rather sprawling examination of the Californian penal system which for me both had the best single literary image of the longlist, but also some more flawed elements. When asked the “what are you working on next” question on the Booker website at the time of “Mars Room”’s shortlisting Kushner talked about ”A novel about the tyranny of the human face, which is, so far, its title. It’s partly about early humans, wanderers of separate tribes—sapiens and Neanderthals—who either snubbed one another, or simply didn’t know, for half a million years, that they coexisted, until one day, two met on a path, cataclysmically, as thrilling new genomic analysis tells us. That part’s the love story. There are some contemporary people in it too, less romantically, and in particular a person of unknown provenance who covers their face, unsettling the rules and lives of those who choose not to.” However, this idea mutated somewhat into this novel set instead set in 2013 France (although with a couple of minor inconsistencies in timing) - and which fits the way the author’s novels progress forwards in time – 1950s, 1970s and early 2000s previously. The novel as published coalesced around a number of other elements which she has described in more recent interviews: Setting: an area of remote southwestern France she knows well and one rich with caves and traces of ancient early human habitation). Milieu: commune of idealistic young Parisians attempting to farm the inhospitable land. Research interest: the early genetic origins of humanity. Narrative tension: the Parisians resistance to the French authorities and in particular their policy of building megabasins – large scale, artificial reservoirs which divert water from small farmers to agro-industrial irrigation. Narrator: a female “spy” acting as an undercover informant and agent provocateur. The idea inspired by the IRL story of Mark Kennedy – the UK police officer who infiltrated various environmental organisations (including some of which Kushner’s friends were members of) forming sexual relationships with a number of the activists before – after a scandal blew up – switching to working in the same line for private organisations. “Sadie Smith” (we do not know her real name) is a 34 year old America – multilingual, ruthlessly focused, self-confident and opinionated, master of seduction with her conventionally beautiful face and cosmetically enhanced body, and even greater master of dissimulation and misdirection. She is a heavy drinker but also heavy thinker and as a first party narrator we gain close access to her thoughts and motivations (unlike anyone around her). Sadie was, we learn, dumped many years ago by the FBI after a honey trap sting in which she lured an young US environmental activist into planning a bombing, was thrown out by the courts for entrapment (as a running background to the novel the documents for that case are just being released). Now she works for an anonymous but clearly well-connected set of masters who we and she surmise represent French big-business interests. Her immediately previous job had her shadowing the hugely unpopular figure of Paul Platon - Deputy Minister for Security in the fictional Ministry of Rural Coherence (loosely modelled on Manuel Valls) - whose job is to persuade areas to accept the installation of unwanted state infrastructure. Now she has been asked to infiltrate Le Moulin, an agricultural collectivist of anarchistic and idealistic subversives run by the charismatic Pascal Balmy and suspected of unproven sabotage. Her introduction is engineered by her by way of Pascal’s cousin Lucien, a filmmaker, her current adopted lover and and (in his eyes) her fiancée - who sets her up to translate the group’s manifesto. As part of her research, she hacks into the emails of the group’s mentor - Bruno Lacombe - often seen as the successor to the notorious IRL Marxist filmmaker and philosopher Guy Debord. But disillusioned by the complete absence of any communist/socialist uprising in the West in the second half of the 20th century, Bruno has turned away from Marxism and rejected not just capitalism, not just a working class who seem content with their exploitation but the whole of humanity - or more specifically Homo sapiens. Rather than harking back to an earlier pre-industrial era he instead goes back to Neanderthal times, believing that all the ills of modern society stem from the very same greed and rapaciousness that allowed Homo Sapiens to largely eradicate the ethically and artistically superior Thals (his term for them). His views on this - and his decision to retreat into a cave network which he believes have the more visionary Thal cave art (not just pictures of hunting and killing) - are set out in a series of emails to the collective and which Sadie summarises for us - being it seems increasingly seduced herself by the shadowy figure of Bruno. We sense too that Kushner rather enjoys exploring these ideas - and particularly the idea of restoring the reputation of the maligned Neanderthals aligns with the championing of the underdog that informs much of her work. Meanwhile at the collective Sadie starts an affair with a man there and starts to find ways to carry out the directions of her shadowy masters which seem to consist of getting the collective to carry out an outrage which will lead to them being arrested en masse as terrorists, with Platon (who is visiting an agricultural fair at which the local farmers and collective were planning a smaller scale and largely peaceful disruption) as a sacrificial pawn - this fair forming the book’s climax. Note that a setting in a Francophone country is something of a theme on this year’s longlist (Playground, This Strange and Eventful History, Held) and like all those books this book also features some famous French people (here for example the novelist Louis Ferdinand Celine as well as the Marxist philosopher Guy Debord). Interestingly both these first two of those books also feature French multinationals although in both cases focused on excavating minerals/metals. Another recurrent theme on this longlist is the use of Old Testament scriptural references (Safekeep – Isaiah; Wandering Star – Proverbs, Job; Stoner Yard Devotional – Psalms; Enlightenment – Ruth and Esther) and here Sadie’s worldview (as well as her grooming technique) is heavily informed by the more world weary parts of Ecclesiastes. Something happens and people think, This was meant to be. The random nature of luck and of incident is too disturbing to acknowledge. I’m not the first to know this. It’s in the Bible. Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and goodness punished. He says that even the most honorable man can be left in town to die in the street, while the greediest fool gets a eulogy and a proper burial. But either people skip that part of the Old Testament, or they never read the Bible at all, and instead they follow their instinct to mythify a sequence of random events and the stream of strangers they encounter in life: Good things happen to them or people they like and they think, “justice.” Bad things happen to people they don’t like and once again they think, justice She also has a strongly held view on the non-political critical essence of people (which she sees as salt) although disappointingly not linked in any way to Lot’s wife. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book a lot - both the spy style capers and Bruno’s home spun prehistorically rooted philosophy in isolation would I think soon wear thin. However the alternating of them, together with the vivid picture Kushner paints of both the local community and of the upper echelons of a French society as well as the additional ideas she brings in - there is for example a thoughtful and fascinating link drawn with the local minority of the Cagots, treated for many centuries as a kind of untouchables caste - make for a novel which at no point overstays its welcome. I also enjoyed seeing a novel which tries something different - both from the author’s previous novel and from most literary fiction (with a sense of fun which is so often lacking from her more earnest contemporaries). If I had a reservation, it is that the novel felt like a story which was building to more of a series of twists, character revelations or just the unification of various plot strands (or revolution of the plot arcs of a faulty sprawling list of cast members) than did occur in the finale. I first was made aware of this novel when the Guardian’s Alex Preston, in his fiction preview of 2024, called it as his “early pick for this year’s Booker” - and while I would be surprised to see this as the winner unless it, in keeping with the song that is ever present in the book, gets lucky, it’s a welcome addition to the longlist. My thanks to Jonathan Cape, Vintage PRH for an ARC via NetGalley. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self ? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being....more |
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0063352613
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| Jun 04, 2024
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really liked it
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On a second read (this was one of only 2 of the 13 I had not read prior to the longlist being published, so I decided to re read them all) I particula
On a second read (this was one of only 2 of the 13 I had not read prior to the longlist being published, so I decided to re read them all) I particularly enjoyed the way in which much of the plot very deliberately mirrored astronomical phenomenon. For example - the concept of comets and their orbital periods explains the way that characters (the troubled woman, the Romanian priest, but also Nathan and even Grace) and objects (Maria’s writing and letters) keep returning. And there are a series of relationships which function like binary stars: the two unrequited lives: Thomas and James, Grace and Nathan; the key relationship in the whole novel Thomas and Grace; but perhaps also Thomas and Maria, Maria and M. Most stars, I’m told, are binary stars, and these pairs affect each other profoundly. One star might waylay another in space, but find in due course it suffers from this new proximity: it is possible for one star to draw matter from another in what they call mass transfer, growing larger and more bright at a dreadful cost to its companion. In this way the bodies of the stars are formed by the forces of attraction between them, and the closer the relation, the higher the risk. If there cannot be equity, I wonder if it’s better to receive the greater proportion of love, or give it? I wish I knew. W. H. Auden, whose poem ‘The More Loving One’ considers the stars’ indifference to the love of men, wrote this: If equal affection cannot be Let the more loving one be me. But also my concerns over the way the novel drifted in the second half - after Thomas moved away from James and Grace from Nathan - were I realised in fact unfair, as the effect is deliberate and based on Kepler’s Second Law. “And did I ever tell you about the laws of Kepler? The first describes how heavenly bodies orbit the sun, and that is the law of ellipses. The second law I’ve memorised as I used to memorise Bible verses when I was young: the semi-major axis sweeps out equal areas in equal time. This means that bodies in orbit move faster and faster as they near the heat of the sun, rushing like a man into his lover’s arms. Then they move past their perihelion, the embrace is done, and they become listless and slow in the dark. Lately it’s seemed to me that you became a kind of sun – that since you’ve been gone I’ve moved through a world with no warmth in it. But my orbit is closed, and everything that passes will in its time return – so I imagine myself moving again towards some heat and light I can’t make out” Overall a very impressive and distinctive novel. ORIGINAL REVIEW So I told her this: that it’s true that I’ve only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I’ve been faithless, devout, loving, indifferent, ardent, diligent and careless; full of loathing and wanting, hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or comforted by providence – and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses its amplitude hour by hour. All the while she sat crying in her childish way. And I wanted to console the child I’d loved, and so I told her this: that in the ordinary way we love because we’re loved, and give more or less what we’re given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand we are made in the image of God – because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. So if you go on loving when your love is unreturned it makes you just a little lower than the angels. I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2024 Booker Prize – although it was very much something I intended to read as I had read all of the Essex-born, now Norfolk-based author’s previous three novels. Her first “After Me Comes The Flood” (2014) was East Anglia Book of the Year and Folio Prize longlisted, It is set in a “slightly off kilter Norfolk” – light on plot (unlike her subsequent work) and more a vehicle to explore ideas of religious faith and doubt and of community which have informed much of her later writing. An early draft (called “Confusion”) was a key part of her Creative Writing PhD (see below). Her second “Essex Serpent” (2016) – set in the fictional village of Aldwinter in the Estuarine marshes of Northeast Essex, it gained commercial (more than 200,000 hardback copies alone) and Prize (Waterstones Book of the Year, Overall winner at the British Book Awards, Costa Prize/Encore Award/Dylan Thomas prize shortlisted, Women’s Prize/Walter Scott Prize longlisted) success – and was later adapted for Apple TV. Something of a cult hit with at its heart the enigmatic widow and amateur palaeontologist Cora Seaborne (whose draw – much as I appreciated the book – seemed lesser on me than on other readers or the characters in the book). And her third Melmoth (2018) was Dylan Thomas Prize shortlisted. Set in Prague and a reimagining of the 1820s novel “Melmoth the Wanderer” by Charles Maturin it drew heavily on the author’s love of the gothic, the use of which by Iris Murdoch inspired her Creative Writing thesis (which also covered Maturin’s book). Her “Melmoth” also as an aside formed half of my eldest daughter’s English A Level NEA. So now with her fourth novel – set in the fictional Essex town of Aldleigh (her childhood home of Chelmsford in all but name) – she finally achieves the Booker Prize longlist she has long deserved and I will note in passing given her PhD thesis that the Booker Prize trophy is now of course named the Iris. And it is even closer to home as it takes place in an around a Strict Baptist Chapel – Bethesda – the same denomination in which the author was raised; strict both in both the more common meaning (the congregants shunning much of the trappings (seen more as entrapments) of modern life – from jeans, to pubs to television to pop music) and the theological one (withholding communion from all but members of the church – who in turn they, based on a Calvinistic/Particular Baptist tradition, believe are part of a pre-determined elect). Their world (or it may be more appropriate to say heavenly) view is described (rather brilliantly by an outsider character) as that “They lived with God, he thought, as if they had a lodger upstairs who'd bang on the floor with a broom if they ever made a noise.” The novel starts in 1997 before moving on to following the same characters in 2008 and 2017 – with the two key characters being Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay. Thomas – a well-dressed but resolutely old-fashioned bachelor (50 years old in 1997) – writes a weekly column for the local newspaper on the topics of literature and ghosts, but in the book’s opening scenes is told by his editor to switch his attentions to astronomy, starting with the in-the-news Hale-Bopp comet and despite his initial lack of enthusiasm finds himself drawn to the subject – seeing in the stars (and planets and comets) as well as in the science behind them (Carlo Rovelli’s writing played a crucial part in the novel’s conception), something of the wonder and beauty and life lessons he first found in a religious faith he is starting to lose (his persistence in faith despite his doubts of course reflecting his name in a form of scriptural normative determinism – and the interplay of faith and doubt being one of the key themes of the novel). Thomas’s relationship with the chapel is now slightly semi-detached, and he feels like he lives something of a double life with frequent trips to London for homosexual encounters which he hides from the church (in the same way he hides his beliefs and background from those he meets in London) “He survived, as he put it to himself, by dividing his nature from his soul,, he left his nature in London on the station platform and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage” Grace –17 when we first meet her - is the daughter of the widowed (her mother having died giving birth to her) Ronald – now pastor of the church – about who the best metaphor line in a novel of brilliantly crafted writing is written: “Then Ronald Macaulay came in with holiness in the pleats of his trousers.” She is something of a free spirit – eccentric in dress and mannerisms, and a magpie like thief but otherwise only now starting to explore the limits on her freedom imposed by the church. She is much loved by Thomas for all he refers to her semi-affectionately as “wretched child”. Thomas (unbeknownst to her) was drawn to stay in the church when being irretrievably struck by her as a few days old baby, determined that he would “keep a foot in the chapel door, and let a little of her spirit out and a little of the world in”. The book begins brilliantly – with some superb old-fashioned and high-quality writing – see for example this early passage describing the chapel – and note the biblical references (Potter’s Field, Bethesda – later explained, and Psalm 37 which only works in the King James version). Also note the effective repetition of 1888 and the clever pun on damned in the last sentence picking up both the world-judging view of the chapel (which of course forces Thomas to keep his sexuality concealed) and on the earlier metaphor about Aldeligh as a river. It was flanked by a mossy wall, and by a derelict patch of ground known to him as Potter’s Field; its iron gate was fastened with a chain. Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its bricks were pale, its proportions austere: it was a sealed container for God …… This was Bethesda Chapel, as fixed in time’s flow as a boulder in a river: Aldleigh ran past it, and round it, and could never change it. Above the door a narrow plaque read 1888, and beyond the bristled threshold mat, 1888 persisted. All the dreadful business of the modern world – its exchange rates, tournaments, profanities, publications, elections, music and changes of administration – washed up against the green door and fell back, dammed. As I said the writing is old fashioned and the same could be said of the characters – but this simply reflects the milieu in which they have developed (and of course in which the author grew up) – and I must admit the references she uses often work better for me than novels which use art history, cinema or modern TV/pop. Returning to the plot – in the book’s opening phase both fall in (earthly) love for the first time. Thomas with James Bower – the head of the local museum who contacts Thomas with something that may interest him (more later); Grace with Nathan – a young lad (from a rather more worldly background than Grace) who first comes into contact with her when he strikes her with a golf ball through the church window. Both love relationships prove doomed – Thomas as it is entirely unrequited by the married James; Grace’s largely due to Thomas’s impulsive decision to impede it (the repercussions of which play out over decades in his relationship with Grace – forgiveness also a theme of the novel). But over the decades they continue to play out in the imagination of Thomas and thoughts of Grace. But that is only the start of the plot which could be described I think as a little maximalist and unashamedly so – Perry spoke of her writing style in a recent interview: There’s a certain terminology around the kind of literature that will always pop up on best books of the year, say: it’s very taut, very spare, as if it’s a woman who’s expected to be very thin. People write about books as if they’re women’s bodies: slender, there’s barely anything there. And I don’t write like that. I can’t. I don’t live like that. For a little while, I thought perhaps I ought to give it a shot. And it was like writing for a year with my left hand. It was just painful and terrible. So I then came to terms with the fact that this is how I write, and how could I not when I was raised reciting reams of the King James Bible and reading Shakespeare for fun? I’m not going to suddenly write frictionless prose with no speech marks.” The other main plot line is a mystery around a woman he identifies as “Maria Vaduva Bell, late of Lowlands House-astronomer, Romanian, unquiet spirit and friend” and who is the intersection of multiple plot lines: the rumoured ghost of an abandoned manor house near the chapel; author of a diary found by James Bower (and why he contacts Thomas); the mysterious woman in a picture Thomas has of the day the chapel was inaugurated – a woman whose ghostly presence has always unsettled him’ for much of the book an actual ghost almost always in the background of scenes involving Thomas and often speaking to him (in his head we assume); an unheralded astronomer and alleged initial observer of a comet (another comet – this is not a book that shies from coincidence) due to appear again in the last section of the book. For a time it feels like any one only has to slightly touch some part of Lowlands House or Bethesda Chapel for another clue about Maria’s life to appear. She also furnishes a link back to Essex Serpent (see below). And other key side characters include (but are not restricted) to: Grace’s Aunt and effectively her adopted Mum; Grace’s Aunt’s rather overbearing and interfering flamboyant friend; a Romanian pastor, victim of Ceausescu’s secret police and now homeless; a lady squatting in Lowlands and obsessed with catastrophic comet conspiracies; a red haired man who turns up towards the end. I must admit after the very strong start than at some points in the middle of the book I did feel the pace was starting to drag and the plot taking slightly too many detours, and also that some of what was going on was a lot more clear to the author than me, and similarly that some of the characters were much more vivid in her imagination than they were to me on the page. However, I think the author does then draw her plot, characters and themes together really well for a very strong ending. Many of Perry’s signature devices appear in the book – the heavy use of the epistolary form (here via frequent reproductions of Thomas’s newspaper columns and by letters – sent and unsent – to James), and more symbolically the frequent appearance of her “familiar” animal – jackdaws. There is also an excursion to Aldwinter and a cameo puzzle-solving role for Cora as easter eggs for her fans. Dymphna Flynn (who I first met when she invited me to the Booker Prize Book Group on the Front Row shows she used to produce) said on a comment to me of this book “I loved it for her integrity in dealing with faith and love both earthly and divine, which I find not fashionable in fiction; but thought fascinating” – and that is I think a brilliant summation of the book one which I am glad to have read and thanks to the Booker judges for accelerating my reading of it. ...more |
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1399724363
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really liked it
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[image] Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcemen [image] Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement as it was mentioned in some Booker speculation. On a second read the theme of mortality/death/end of life became much clearer and an equally dominant one with those of forgiveness and of activism/retreat in the face of environmental decay (and whether either really works) which I identified the first time - right up to the very end of the book. “My mother said that anything that had once been alive shoula go back into the soil. Food scraps went into the compost, of course, including meat and bones, despite the general advice against this. Paper, torn into strips to allow air and microbes to move freely through. She would cut old pure cotton or silk or woollen clothes into small shreds and compost them too. Fish bones and flesh. Linen tea towels. She reluctantly left out larger pieces of wood, but longed for a woodchipper. She left cane furniture to rot and then buried it. She quoted a Buckingham Palace gardener she had once seen on television, who added leather boots to his compost bin. All that was needed was time, and nature. Anything that had lived could make itself useful, become nourishment in death, my mother said. I was struck again though by the quiet and contemplative nature of much of the writing and perhaps one of my favourite images (for its subtle depth) across the longlist. “I yanked at the sheet and the motion sent everything to the carpet. I lifted the sheet with two hands and it billowed slowly back down, and as it did I felt some otherworldly possibility open up inside myself … stood looking at the bed and breathing. It isn't something I ever told anyone - how could you say this? - but the lift and descent of that sheet, the air inside it, the peace when it settled, showed me what I wanted. However I also found the three visitations a little more jarring this time - for all they allowed the themes to be examined and developed (part directly, part allegorically) they seemed to detract a little from the core of the novel and the author’s stated intent to “try to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos’, risking a tonal restraint and depth”. In particular this is true of the mouse infestation which rather than being turned down seems to be dialled up to a Nigel Tufnel style 11. Booker links: the theme of death and end of life that plays through this novel dominates the final parts of This Strange Eventful History (earlier parts of which are - like this novel - set in Australia, a land the Booker has largely ignored for around a decade). the narrator’s school day reminiscences include a predatory piano teacher of the boys in her class - which links to the incident which caused the rift between Hendrick and his mother in Safekeep. ORIGINAL REVIEW In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what's happening but I'm drenched in a weird tranquillity so deep it puts a stop to thought. Is it to do with being almost completely passive, yet still somehow participant? Or perhaps it's simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit. This is the author’s seventh novel and the first I have read. Her fifth “The Natural Way of Things” won the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction; her sixth “The Weekend” was shortlisted for both prizes. An austere and quiet novel which looks at the challenge of forgiveness for severe transgressions, examines spiritual and religious practices through an atheist lens and looks at the dilemma between engaging with the intractability of global issues, or instead retreating from them into ritual and contemplation. The unnamed first party narrator is starts the book as a non-believing guest – for a short term retreat - at a Catholic Convent in rural New South Wales (close to where she was born and where her parents – including her eccentric but generous spirited mother – are both buried – graves she has not visited for 30 years). This first part of the novel – where she effectively observes as a visitor, and joins on the fringes, the practices of the convent will I think be alien to many readers – with the silences and reflections: but I make a point from time to time on taking a weekend at a Christian retreat centre (there is a lovely one near Battle in Sussex) and even last time I was there purchased a round edged cross to hold in the hand like the narrator albeit with more purpose (for me to stop me reaching for my smartphone). I do buy a plain sandalwood-scented candle, a plastic torch and a wooden cross. The cross has rounded edges and fits snugly in the hand. I am a bit ashamed of it. I don't know why I buy it, except maybe as a mark of respect to these people, and as a kind of talisman, to hold and feel. It is for the body, not the mind. In the second part of the novel – we are perhaps initially surprised (as perhaps is the narrator and as definitely are her friends and colleagues) that she has joined the community permanently – the question of her lack of belief never really explicitly raised. From the little detail we get of her past live we understand (or at least I did) that she has turned her back both on an environmental organisation for which she works (the Threatened Species Rescue Centre) and on her marriage (to it seems some form of environmental activist as well). And in this second section, while the mediative aspects of both the narrator’s life and the writing remain – there are three separate visitations to the convent: Visitant: a guest or visitor like Helen Parry, or a supernatural being, an apparition, like a saint. Like a delivery of bones, like a plague. Firstly a plague of mice – which has it seems to be both aspects resonant of the plagues God via Moses let loose on Egypt, but is also intimately related to the climate change and species displacement that dominated the narrator’s before-life, and even has some links to the COVID “plague” which is still impacting the world at the time of the novel. And note also that the very idea of retreat was explicitly inspired in the author by the impact of lockdown and how it lead to a sudden imposed retreat from the “kind of constant flurry of activity that we generally live in. “ Secondly the discovery of the body of a former nun who left the convent to run a relief mission overseas but was murdered – and the decision to repatrirate the bones and to bury them in the convent grounds – a nun with an unresolved before her death conflicted relationship with one of the other nuns. Thirdly – the person who accompanies the bones – effectively a celebrity nun and high profile campaigner (Helen Parry) whose presence and activism initially threatens the nuns and the narrator by the contrast with their turning of their backs on the world. But the narrator – between fighting of the mice – has a more personal impact: as she knew Helen from when she was a child - (when Helen was abused by her troubled mother and shunned and humiliated by the other children including the narrator) – something the narrator reflects on with shame especially when contrasting with some of the much more charitable activities of her own mother on which she increasingly reflects. The author has said in interviews: “There is something sacred … or holy about [writing]. When you're fully engaged in it, when you're fully absorbed in the practice of it, there is an almost prayer-like aspect." – and I think that sense of sacredness informs the writing of the novel. It is one with lines taken all the way from REM to Simone Weil by way of Nick Cave – but one key line is Matisse’s 1951 claim that “All art worthy of the name is religious. Be it a creation of lines, or colors: if it is not religious, it does not exist. If it is not religious, it is only a matter of documentary art, anecdotal art…which is no longer art.” Overall, this was a novel which spoke to me strongly – a lot with which I am familiar but told through the eyes of a narrator (and an author) whose default reaction is scepticism but who over time examines their beliefs just as the best novels – like this one – cause me to examine my own. In the hallway to the dining room hangs the famous Julian of Norwich quotation: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Nearby, in a little alcove, hangs something else - a boxed collection of pinned dead butterflies, orange and black, apparently a gift from some old priest of the area, long dead.. ...more |
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0241652308
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really liked it
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[image] Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcemen [image] Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement as it was mentioned in some Booker speculation. I was intrigued how this would work on a re-read given the “twist” It actually worked well - I think because the book is more than the twist: Isabelle re-examining aspects of her life (the confrontations with Uncle Karel and Rian) and then the working out of her relationship with Eva. So knowing what was coming (which anyway I know different readers worked out at different times) did not really change the story. And I did admire the author’s decision to have a positive ending. She has said of this: “This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s so, so much more impressive when a hopeful ending is made to feel true, like a real possibility. It’s harder than making a sad ending feel true and possible—that’s life. That’s more or less my relationship to hope, I think. It’s hard work, but God, isn’t it impressive when it works?” My favourite passage second time around “What certainty can you give me? What home” Booker link: Hendrik’s falling out with his mother stems from an encounter with a predatory piano teacher - such a teacher also appears in a story the narrator of Stone Yard Devotional remembers from her childhood. ORIGINAL REVIEW The Hebrew scripture was inlaid in what once must have been a gold-painted stone but was now graying, dull. She stepped closer. In Roman letters, the quote announced itself: Isaiah, 56:7. Isabel drove back home. Her Bible she kept in her room, on her shelf. The little hare leaned its little back against it. Isabel found the quote. For my house will be called, she read, finger next to the number seven, a house of devotion for all. The author was Tel Aviv born (and spent her early childhood there) before moving with her Israeli citizen mother and Dutch father to her father’s country where she now teaches. This essay (https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articl...) gives a good background on her conflicted relationship with her heritage and with her adopted society. The novel, set in the Eastern Netherlands in 1961, opens in and is dominated by the third party viewpoint of Isabel. Isabel, while not a practicing believer, is infused though with a Dutch Calvinistic sense of austerity, primness, and judgementalism and self-denial. She still lives, now alone, in the family home that she and her family (her mother – whose worldview seems to have permeated her own – and her 2 brothers moved into – from their Amsterdam home – in 1944 at the tail end of the war, when she was 11, her older brother Louis 13 and her younger brother Hendrik 11). Now their mother dead the house is promised to Louis when he gets married – but with Louis something of a Lothario she assumes he will never settle down and increasingly sees the house as her own possession – obsessing over the housekeepers she employs and discards for some form of transgression – the book opening with her finding a shard of one of her mother’s favourite plates (Delft like with a hare design) and having to be talked down by the calmer Hendrik (who also tries to stop her habit of pinching her skin) from accusing the latest maid of breaking and hiding it. Hendrik left home some years back after a row with his mother about his homosexuality – and now lives with a mixed race male partner. Isabel seems determined to be a life long virgin – fending off the rather clumsy advances of her putative boyfriend. The opening chapter – and the original seed for the novel in a creative working exercise – has the three siblings getting together with Louis bringing his latest girlfriend Eva to the condescension of Hendrick and the open hostility of Isabel – who is then horrified when Louis visits her only 12 days later saying that he has to go to a conference abroad and that Eva is to stay with her while he is away in the family home that she now thinks of as simply for her. From there the book develops as the relationship between Isabel and the slightly mysterious but quietly fierce Eva (no known family) simmers – first of all into scarcely concealed animosity but then veering into sudden passion. Amusingly in the Acknowledgements she thanks her family for their respect in not talking to her about Chapter 10 – and I have to say that I was not really sure what to say about that Chapter in my review, so I will share their respectfulness. But Isabel’s paranoia does not rescind – and she is convinced that her servant is gradually stealing some of her mother’s old possessions and keepsakes – and suspicious and unhappy at Eva’s befriending of the maid. And tension mounts as Louis’s return brings to a head her Isabel and Eva’s affair. The book then takes a twist – although one I think most readers will have seen coming at some point (even if only a few pages earlier) with the novel then switching to (appropriately given the essay I referenced) a diary which brings everything into perspective. But the twist is not the end of the story – as it’s the resolution of the revelations which really plays out in a strong closing section which I think makes the novel a success. I felt that when reading it this novel was in a complex conversation with the Women’s Prize shortlisted, Aspen Words Literary Prize and RSL Encore Award winning novel “Enter Ghost” by Isabella Hammad – and particularly the verse which opens my review of that book. And I particularly liked this quote from the author when asked about how the novel speaks to on-going events: This is what the story is about. It’s about displacement, and it’s about the way that we think about ownership. Loving a place does not make us the owners of it. What I’m really afraid of is that people will read this and be like, “Naive Yael, thinking that we can all live in one house and only love could save us at the end of the day.” I know it’s not that simple. I know it’s not that, but it is what I wanted for these characters. Also because that’s the history of me. That’s the history of where I come from. And these are the two histories of displacement that I’ve, sort of, both lived through and had in my history. The story is about Isabel herself having to deal with complicity. I embody those two ends of the spectrum: both complicity on the one hand and, on the other hand, also a history of victimhood. Both of them are within me and that’s not even counting my Dutch grandmother, who was born in Indonesia and was part of a colonial system. Overall an extremely assured debut novel which starts as something of a gothic psychological novel, takes a turn into a highly charged erotic one, ends as a surprisingly positive love story but which is also at heart a powerful examination of the unspoken elements in post war Dutch society. ...more |
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1914198719
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| 3.59
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really liked it
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[image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement [image] Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement as it was mentioned in some Booker speculation. I have to say that following on from the way that the initial momentum wore off first time - on a second read through the book revealed very little new and was definitely the weakest of the novels on a re-read. This quite second time around struck me again but more for its mention of repetition than the idea of a circular groove. “As the referees begin this fourth bout, the last bout of the day, in this darkened warehouse where only nine onlookers remain, there is the implication of a loop, or the suggestion of a repetition, a circular groove within which the tournament has fit its narrative.” The fidelity to boxing me bothered me just as much the second time. The author said in a Booker interview after being Longlisted (in which incidentally she name checks Kick The Latch - see my initial interview - as the book that impressed her the most). “I wrote this book l because I wanted to remember how I felt when I was a young woman and obsessively competed in every sport I could find. I would often drive, or have my parents drive me, to tournaments that felt very similar to the tournament in this book. My hope is that boxers, and lovers of boxing, will find authenticity in this book, but that also anyone who has ever been gripped by an obsessive drive to accomplish something, and to be seen at a time when they felt otherwise invisible, will find themselves in these pages.” And my conclusion is that she achieved the second aim much more than the first. The best chapters remained the first two and my impression from my first read - not one mentioned in my review - that that story may have been better combined as a standalone novella in a collection of short stories about young women playing sport - was even stronger this time. ORIGINAL REVIEW Like a boxing match, the backwards and forwards movements of how girl fighters spring up over time is not linear. Rose Mueller does not immediately get reborn as another girl fighter. Rather, each girl born has the ability to be activated into a boxer. When Artemis Victor and Andi Taylor and Iggy Lang and Izzy Lang and Rachel Doricko and Kate Heffer and Tanya Maw all age out of the Daughters of America tournament they will immediately be replaced by new fighters. The book was published by Daunt Books Publishing – an independent publisher which grew out of the independent bookshop chain. With Kathryn Scanlon’s knockout “Kick the Latch” winning the Gordon Burn Prize in 2023-24 and Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life” Booker shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, they are definite prize fighters ever since they threw their hat in the ring, punching above their weight when compared to many of the heavyweight publishers, albeit it must help having James Daunt (MD of Waterstones) in your corner if you are trying to score points with the judges. The 12th Annual Women’s 18 and Under Daughters of Americas Cup at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, NV July 14th – July 15th 20xx …. so this novel starts and so it is structured and proceeds. The set up is simple but clever and relatively unique: the tournament – which had 100s of competitors and is a national championship - is down to its last two days and its last 8 boxers, who compete in four quarter finals, two pre-drawn semi-finals and a final. Each of these seven bouts is a chapter of the book – listing the two fighters and with each round proceeded by a tournament bracket - which take place immediately before, during and immediately after the fight, and largely in the heads of the two boxers – in an extreme form of unspoken dialogue (both sizing each other up) combined with interior monologue (as the boxers thoughts range over their past) but expressed through a third party narrator (who often looks into the near-term, post tournament as well as long term future of the two boxers – typically linking their future jobs back to the bout). In later chapters the voices of the girls merge a little – with each boxer rather cleverly inheriting something of the story of their vanquished opponent. Two other short chapters cover the night between the two days with a final post tournament chapter starting with the immediate aftermath but then (not entirely successfully for me) swooping into the long term future and even other-planetary settlements. The boxers briefly are: Artemis Victor (following in the footsteps and perhaps overshadowed by two older and highly successful siblings); Andi Taylor (by contrast very much on her own and whose life has been impacted by a young boy who drowned when she was serving as a lifeguard); Rachel Doricko (who delights in unsettling others both in life and boxing – for example by wearing weird-hats); Kate Heffer (from a more prosperous background – someone who believes that life adapts to her - and who reals off the digits of Pi during her bouts); two cousins Izzy and the younger Iggy Lang; Rose Mueller (from a small village and Catholic community); and Tanya Maw (who reflects on her mother having left home when she was young). There is a lot to like about the book – the bouts can be very engrossing and the tournament bracket idea works really well, and the idea of the narrator is a fascinating one. I enjoyed an interview with the author where she makes enlightening comments on some of her choices: I think the [tournament bracket] structure’s closest literary relative is a map, which is often included at the beginning of books, especially science fiction and fantasy books. It’s a visual to ground the reader in an unreal world. The space of the tournament has always felt very unreal to me. I think I needed a tether to earth, and with the tether of the tournament map I could take the narrative really far out in deep time and future space. Interestingly the book has a lot of overlap with another book I read recently – the Orwell Prize finalist “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey. Taking place over limited and specified time (2 days here, 1 day there) but in a deliberately unspecified year; an imposed regular structure (a tournament bracket, earth orbits); an omniscient narrator who swoops between characters who seemingly (slightly unrealistically) muse on their lives while going about other tasks; the way in which the free form of the thoughts contrasts with but is facilitated by the regularity of the chapter structure; no reported dialogue; the characters merging at times into a collective. I did have some concerns about the book. My interest rather waned over time – other than the “story merging” idea I felt that the author seemed to run out of ideas a little in subsequent rounds of the tournament. By having the narrator in the first matches go far into the future of each boxer – it meant there was relatively little to cover in their subsequent fights and the chapters were shorter but also less enjoyable (at least for me) as a result. In one case in particular (Rachel Doricko) I felt that a feature of the earlier round – a quirk but one fundamental to how her character is described and how she is contrasted to her opponent (her use of images and phrases to experience and remember the fight) is completely dropped for her next fight. Run under the auspices of the fictional Women’s Youth Boxing Association and at a deliberately unspecified date the boxing itself is I have to say rather fictional. At first I thought perhaps US girl’s boxing was different to Amateur boxing that for example will shortly be featured at the Olympics – but as the book went on I realised that this was not really representative of actual boxing at all. Some examples: junior girls going eight rounds (I think that would get you closed down pretty quickly by the medical authorities and lead to lots of future lawsuits– three would be more normal); no mention of TKOs or stoppages (and this takes away some of the hazard of the sport – that with one punch or flurry a fight can end, even if one boxer is hopelessly outclassed but also increases some of the danger - in reality the second fight would have been stopped by the referee); points called sometimes when blows struck and always announced at the end of each round so the boxers know who is ahead (again very different to the usual scenes where both boxers are convinced they won); bouts stopping if someone has won more than half the rounds (as without any mechanism to stop the fight they have lost); extra round if a tie (again the medical implications are obvious and ignored). Now as I said there is a strong fictional element to the set up – but the lack of fidelity for me rather took me out of the experience of the book as I started to think of the bouts as fencing-with-fists rather than boxing. I would contrast the novel here with a Kathryn Scanlon’s brilliant Gordon Burn Prize winning “Kick The Latch” – another notionally sport based reflective novel by the very same UK publisher, but one dripping with authenticity. Overall, a novel I enjoyed reading and admirable for its inventiveness – with the narrator/structure reinforcement particularly clever – but one perhaps losing its initial momentum and for me also slightly undermined by the lack of fidelity to real life sport. ...more |
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really liked it
| He’d asked his mother before leaving, small questions without raising suspicion, about Sree, about Vijaya. He walked to the red postbox. The metal He’d asked his mother before leaving, small questions without raising suspicion, about Sree, about Vijaya. He walked to the red postbox. The metal was warm from the day. He had written the letter on the train, he had written without pausing. He did not strike things out, he did not re-write. He wrote recklessly. Now, in this moment, he grew aware of the fact that this letter leaving his hands would breach the boundaries he had set up around himself, and perhaps ones she had too. Time had built those boundaries. Regret had built those boundaries. Guilt had built those boundaries. And the transgression he was committing now would destroy them, raze them, and he knew that it was a transgression he would never be able to stop himself from committing again, that it may fate him to yearn for her as long as he lived. The author of this book Ruthvika Rao and grew up in Hyderabad and worked for many years as a computer programmer (I think in the US) before studying at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she refined the manuscript for this book – one I would describe as a literary love story (across social and caste divides) set in her birthplace of the Indian state of Telangana and written in her second language of English (although with some limited Telegu – her first language, all of which is explained – this is thankfully not one of those books with huge amounts of untranslated langauge) The book starts in 1970 in the small village of Irumi in a dramatic scene where a 11-year-old boy – Kanakam, son of a tanner and therefore an outcast - wanders through the burning gadi (the local manor house) ruled by the local zarimandars (feudal landlords with life and death type powers) the Deshmukh family – who he watches being summarily executed after being sentenced to death by a “people’s court” of armed guerillas. The rest of the story then – starting in 1955 – leads up to this incident, concentrating on the Deshmukh household (including two daughters of the Zaminder’s brother – Vijaya and the younger Sree, the latter strongly favoured by their mother) as well as one of their live-in servants (Katya – who seems oddly favoured in the household) and the two sons of another seamstress servant (the older and rather reckless Ranga – already doing the lifelong indentured servitude known as vetti - and the one year younger and more academic Krishna – who his mother has asked to be exempted from vetti and sent to school). The key episode of the novel – and both families lives – occurs in that year. Vijaya and Krishna (who have developing feelings for each other despite the various social lines that crosses) hatch a plan to try and capture a man-eating tiger that has even managed to elude Vijaya’s Uncle – and end up taking Ranga and Sree with them, only for Sree to have a terrible fall into a ravine. Ranga takes the blame for the incident (he and Vijaya deny that Krishna came with them) and the Zaminder despite knowing they are lying – beats Ranga on a whipping post almost to death (forcing his mother to watch) – also agreeing to Krishna going to school but only on the condition he never returns (and that Ranga never leaves) so aiming to stop any relationship with Vijaya. The book then follows the lives of the various individuals: Ranga ultimately joining and rising in the Marxist Naxalite guerilla group; Vijaya trying to find some freedom from her family – but struggling with her mother’s seeming hatred for her as well as her own guilt over Sree’s health and eventually the shadow of an arranged marriage; Krishna befriended by a Hinda-Nationalist anti-communist student activist who draws him into dangerous political activity against both his wishes and the advice of his professor. Vijaya and Krishna re-make illicit contact after Krishna reappears at a village fair. And in the background the power of the Zaminder’s starts to diminish as the Naxalite lead uprisings become more frequent. Overall, I found this an interesting novel – although one that is very plot and character rather than innovation or language driven. Immersive perhaps more than impressive. It is published by the independent press Oneworld – who have managed no win no fewer than three of the last nine Booker Prizes (2015, 2016 and 2023) – and I think this does have a longlisting chance although I don’t easily see it going much further and it is probably more suited to the Women’s Prize (which they have not yet one despite several longlistings). My thanks to Oneworld for an ARC via NetGalley ...more |
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B0CV1Q9D2Z
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it was ok
| I had trusted my own lies in the early days with my husband. By the time I met him, Clove had become a real and full person to me, the resilient ch I had trusted my own lies in the early days with my husband. By the time I met him, Clove had become a real and full person to me, the resilient child of parents who had died together tragically, the ever-growing, self-improving adult. Substance-free, with an early bedtime, a morning run and evening yoga routine, meditation, the cleanest of eating. Grueling shifts at grocery stores, no room for nightmares of my father and me in the middle of the ocean, only room for item codes. Fennel bulb 10223, head of radicchio 10557. Then, when I married and left grocery, I filled my head with the consumerism of impending motherhood, researching things to buy, NoseFrida, DockATot, balm for everything from nips to lips, preparing the way for the arrival of a new person who would be a glimmer of myself, but so much better: they would never know you or my father. But then Nova arrived, and along with her, my father cruising around my block in his Jimmy. Told in the first party voice of Clove, and effectively addressed to her absent mother, we immediately realise that Clove – outwardly a whole foods and health supplement obsessed, Instagram-influencer mother of a seven year old girl and three year old boy, living with her husband in reasonable prosperity in Portland – lived a very different life as a child with the threat of violence from her father (particularly towards her mother) ever present. And quickly after (and this is not a spoiler as it is revealed in the start of the second chapter) we realise that she is living something of a double life – firstly hiding a debt-racking-up online shopping issue from her husband, but more seriously the fact that – rather than the story he believes that she was orphaned by a car crash when around 17 – her mother was convicted of murdering her father, she fleeing the scene and adopting, with the contrivance of a sympathetic neighbour, the identity of Celine (the neighbours chronically sick daughter of the same age, now many years later dead). Now a letter from her mother in prison threatens to unmoor the life she has carefully created and curated – including a husband she picked for both his safety and normality and that, unlike her first lover and soulmate, he knows nothing of her past. Her mother, who she had not realised knew where she lived – she immediately thinks her earlier lover must be to blame and contacts him for the first time after running out on him – wants her help for an appeal that she is hatching with the help of an activist feminist lawyer. And into the mix Clove becomes obsessed with Jane – a glamourous if rather adrift woman she literally runs into (with her car in her confusion after getting the letter) and then subsequently meets working at her favourite health store. When Clove offers the homeless Jane board in exchange for acting as a nanny for the children, the relationship starts to veer off the rails, with Jane increasingly wanting to influence her decisions (and hoping that Clove will agree to birth child for her to adopt). And from there the book which seems to circle around the same ideas albeit with increasing tension, suddenly unwinds itself with a series of revelations. To be honest this is not really my normal literary read – a little too much in the form of a psychological thriller - and I was not always that comfortable with the juxtaposition of a serious subject matter (domestic abuse) with an increasingly coincidence and twist driven plot. However, I know that the author is writing from a place of having to deal with a difficult upbringing and a high trauma childhood and as an encounter at a school event reveals that is understandably likely to be lead to a different type of book from the literary prize winning fare I normally read. Overall I think this will appeal to many fans of psychological drama. My thanks to Oneworld Publications for an ARC via NetGalley A line had formed behind me, and in it stood a father from Nova’s class who was a real writer. Last I’d heard he was penning a long, important pastoral American novel that might actually be one of a trilogy. But what did he know about America? A profile I’d read of him mentioned his wife brought him tea to his study. America was my mother trying to take a community college class and my father beating her up before she could get out the door. This writer reminded me of the thing I’d learned at college that nearly broke me, nearly derailed my plan of forward success and normalcy: no matter what I did, I would never catch up to the very apparent generational wealth all around me. I wasn’t talking about money, though that mattered too. I was talking about the wealth of familial love. The leg up of a trauma-free or low-trauma childhood. The students around me had parents who called every other day, who beckoned them home for the holidays, where their childhood bedrooms were still intact, like shrines. They had not had to bloody their hands to get a seat at the table. And this man in line, this real writer. I could only imagine how much he’d been encouraged, nurtured, connected, and exposed early in life to the arts and sciences. Above all, given access. He gave me a small wave. He’d probably win a Pulitzer Prize....more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 21, 2024
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Jul 22, 2024
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Jul 20, 2024
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3.57
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| Aug 01, 2024
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really liked it
| Gillis tried to explain. How the ancient elm tree in the manse garden had been leaning toward the kirk, and the spire had started to crack. So they Gillis tried to explain. How the ancient elm tree in the manse garden had been leaning toward the kirk, and the spire had started to crack. So they had to pull the tree out. And Gillis had fallen into the hole they’d left and found this hand. Which was strange enough, but the hand could actually move and it drew pictures as if it was trying to tell us all something, though it was anyone’s guess what the images were meant to represent. ‘Here, wait here,’ he said, and grabbed the papers from the kitchen table, then brandished them at his father. He told him how recently, only last week, there had been a miracle. The flash of light, the angel, the insects and the fish. This is a very distinctive and unsettling debut novel – which I think examines how the Scottish reformation lies buried in rural Scottish society to this day, despite the prevalence of agnosticism. It is told from the third party viewpoint of Gillis – now in his early thirties and a minister in the Church of Scotland in a remote and largely run-down coastal town where the only remaining industry is fishing-dominated, that in turn being increasingly centred around some large (and for from organic) salmon farms with the harbour and fishing boats returning increasingly diminished catches and with all of these (as well as the local hotel, smokehouses and it seems the manse in which Gillis lives and the crumbling Kirk next to it) owned by a local man Nicholson (known to all as Nichol). Gillis we learn early on was a successful long distance cross country/road-race athlete as a youth (having turned to it after an abortive football career) and moved to England with dreams of fame – only for his knackered knees to put pay to his success. Drifting in England for some years – and having broken off with his Scottish girlfriend Rachel (who he knew since primary school) – he has returned to his home area after a divinity degree despite a lack of belief (“Never believed in God, or heaven, or anything. Just needed the work and wanted a house and a decent car. He knew heaven was empty, so who would it hurt?”). Now his work consist almost entirely of carrying out funerals. Two key incidents begin the book: Firstly, falling down a hole left by a falling elm tree which has undermined and cracked the Kirk he finds a severed hand which appears still to be alive – capable of pointing and producing crude but disturbing sketches (which are threaded through the book). Gillis feels it is somehow a message from God but does not know how to receive the message and disturbs people by showing them the drawings, while carrying the hand in a shortbread tin. Secondly a funeral he is asked to take turns out to be for the husband of Rachel (now mother to a small boy Jamie) who has gone missing at sea – the husband a bookkeeper for Nichol had gone out to sea on one of Nichol’s boats (something he enjoyed doing) still wearing his office clothes and was swept overboard – his body now missing (although later found which gives rise to a second funeral which forms the climax of the book). Then when Nichol finds the hand – after a post funeral tussle with Gillis as who thinks the pictures are somehow pointing out his culpability in Rachel’s husband’s death (as a key aside this winds up with Gills and Rachel spending the night together after she tends his wounds) – he comes round the next day to say that the hand has somehow cured a chronic skin condition with which he suffered. Nichol then tries to draw Gillis into two schemes: to persuade the church to deconsecrate the Kirk and move the bodies in the graveyard so as to facilitate his plans to bail out his fading and infection-affected fish-farms by developing the Kirk into flats; to somehow monetise the miracle producing impact of the hand – which also seems to cure Nichol’s secretaries cancer and later the fish-blight. But Gillis is increasingly drawn to almost messianic visions of his destiny as some form of prophet – able to lead Scotland into national renewal and a rediscovery of faith (for example believing the hand is the first part of the discovery of a long buried national hero). While to others – Rachel (considering a restored relationship with him but disturbed by his behaviour); Gillis’s father (convinced that Gillis has committed murder and trying to get him to escape); the authorities (police and medical) and the church (who are already considering axing Gillis’s post due to its lack of revenue) – Gillis’s behaviour is increasingly erratic and demanding of intervention. Gillis’s story is though only the main narrative. Interleaved through his story is one set many hundreds of years earlier in what we intuit is the same location. A young apprentice painter Jan is on his way to deliver a lavishly illustrated Book Of Hours and Prayers to the Laird of Hamilton (a commissioned gift by the Laird for his wife) when he is swept off board and washed up on a river with the book already damaged. His attempts to deliver the damaged book are rebuffed and he finds himself caught up in a violent anti-superstition/Catholicism uprising by a group of austere black jacketed men (to which he claims the book was part of a devilish plot) and then later a counter-revolution with the black jackets treated as heretics to be burnt (in which he is again caught up). During all of this the book gets more and more cut up and damaged – and Jan makes something of a living firstly trading extracts of the book for food and lodgings and then later using torn strips of the book as miraculous charms as an itinerant (if rather fraudulent) healer and holy man. Increasingly we see the stories converge and both reach a climax (Gillis’s at the second funeral and with a dramatic roof top escape ended by a lightning strike; Jan’s when his hand is put to the flames) and a convergence. Overall, I found this a very distinctive novel – if not a completely successful one. The modern day sections worked really well for me – there is an offbeat humour and the side characters (Nichols, Rachel and Gillis’s Dad) and their relationships have a satisfactory level of complexity and ambiguity to them. The historic sections did not quite work so well for me – more based on empirical evidence as I was always pleased to return to Gillis’s story. I was also unsure that I really grasped everything that was happening – in particular the drawings (whose very inclusion in the story seems to herald their importance) remained unclear to me in their meaning – and perhaps that could go for the whole novel in that I was not fully clear if there was a deeper meaning to the novel beyond its intriguing quirkiness. My thanks to Atlantic Books for an ARC via NetGalley A loose spiral of seagulls ascended to heaven and returned with no message save an incoherent screech. On the horizon, blurred between cloud and sea, no drones and no missile strikes. The established powers seemed to suspect nothing. Why would the light of God’s grace and truth have fallen here? Rain and cloud and roof tile, moss and bird shit, he pushed himself to climb further. To the very peak of the spire and the upright cross. A golden door might open? Something might be passed to him. Or he might be asked to return the hand to its original owner. The Archangel Michael, or the Pale Rider who announces the end of this world. Or maybe he would be welcomed inside, into the hallways of heaven. The waiting rooms. The conference centre. Might meet one of those terrible beings, the ones with eyes all over its wings and wings all over its eyes. Wheels spinning above and below. A sword for a tongue. He wished he had his Bible with him. Gillis could slip in and out of these ideas, believing, then not believing, toggling between third and first person, staring down at the crown of his own head, embarrassed and selfconscious. Then back behind his own eyes, staring down at the shortbread tin held in front of him like a weapon....more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 19, 2024
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Jul 19, 2024
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Jul 19, 2024
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B0CMBN4X4Q
| 4.04
| 957
| Jul 09, 2024
| Aug 01, 2024
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really liked it
| Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane? Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise. The book is narrated by Aysa – trained as an anthropologist and now a funded documentary filmmaker. She lives in a foreign City (in what I at least took as the USA) with her boyfriend Manu who she originally met doing fieldwork in his hometown and who now works at a nonprofit. The two of them are looking at moving out of their current rented apartment and buying somewhere together to make more of a foundation to their lives in what for both of them is something of a country of exile from their own (different) countries. Aysa meanwhile bases her documentary om filming interviews with those who use a local park. Their small group of friends include: Ravi “We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be.”“– the three forming a tight group, particularly Manu and Ravi; Lena – Aysa’s “only native friend in the City” who she met at a monthly expatriates group; Tereza – an elderly and increasingly dementia affected lady who lives above them. They are also visited by both sets of parents – which reminds them of their very different lives in their hometowns where they would be part of interwoven community of family/tribal ties and obligations. And these ideas of community, family, tribe lie at the very heart of the novel and Aysa’s quest – really seeking to make her and Manu’s new life into something meaningful by working out (and in some cases founding) the series of rituals, the ties of friendship, that will make up their new life including of course where they will choose to live (and how they will choose to live there) The novel is told in a very fragmentary form – short sections all with a heading and with a number of headings repeating. For example Future Selves (which are the sections where they view possible new homes and imagine their lives there); Principles of Kinship (which are largely sections about the friendships and relationships they are building); In the Park (records of Aysa’s interview – with Fieldwork her initial preparation); Ways To Live (as Aysa tries to assemble rituals that will define their lives “the green jacket, the ceremonial stones, breakfast with Manu, the Dame on the terrace, and the shapes of poems”). And with many more one-off: Courtship, ChildRearing, Urban Costume, Gift Exchange etc. Overall this is a simple novel – but one with a deeper meaning despite its rather quirky approach. At one point Aysa’s grandmother chides her over the phone: “Forget about daily life … We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.” And that of course lies at the heart of the novel – one which does not tell an epochal tale but instead examines what it means to make a life together, particularly away from family and home. My thanks to Simon and Schuster for an ARC via NetGalley My last year at university, one professor of anthropology trained our attention inward at the close of every lecture. The professor looked wizened beyond age and seemed perpetually troubled by the world, which made me inclined to take her teachings seriously. She asked us to notice that just life—writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs—could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class. Friday night blackouts and graduations and hockey games, the cigarettes we bummed off one another outside the library. All these were the unspoken foundations of our society, whose rules we had perfected, so as not to think of them as rules but as the smooth tracks of life. From time to time, the professor would ask us to imagine an anthropologist observing the everyday routines with which we had set up our lives. They might be arbitrary or essential, but they were rules to a game nonetheless, one which gave an illusory sense of harmony and permanence. The first time she brought up the imaginary anthropologist, I visualized a tiny Martian in a safari outfit, taking notes on a flip chart. But even with the absurd image, the point was clear. The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives....more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 18, 2024
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Jul 18, 2024
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Jul 18, 2024
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Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: Read (2123)
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4.12
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it was amazing
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Oct 06, 2024
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Oct 06, 2024
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4.22
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really liked it
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Sep 23, 2024
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Sep 27, 2024
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4.35
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really liked it
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Sep 28, 2024
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Sep 26, 2024
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4.43
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really liked it
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Sep 24, 2024
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Sep 26, 2024
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3.98
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it was ok
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Sep 20, 2024
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Sep 26, 2024
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4.00
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really liked it
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Sep 26, 2024
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Sep 23, 2024
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4.24
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really liked it
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Sep 10, 2024
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Sep 13, 2024
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4.38
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it was amazing
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Sep 13, 2024
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Sep 11, 2024
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3.92
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really liked it
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Sep 06, 2024
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Sep 04, 2024
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3.82
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2024
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Sep 01, 2024
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3.88
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2024
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Aug 21, 2024
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3.59
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really liked it
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Aug 30, 2024
Aug 06, 2024
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3.66
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really liked it
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Aug 29, 2024
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3.71
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really liked it
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Aug 27, 2024
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4.11
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really liked it
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3.59
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really liked it
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4.30
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really liked it
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Jul 25, 2024
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3.76
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it was ok
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Jul 22, 2024
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Jul 20, 2024
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3.57
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really liked it
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Jul 19, 2024
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Jul 19, 2024
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4.04
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really liked it
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Jul 18, 2024
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Jul 18, 2024
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