Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys + Interview with Jessica Harrison, Senior Commissioning Editor for Penguin Classics

The narrator of “Good Morning, Midnight” is a woman who has renamed herself Sasha and lives a desultory existence in a shabby little apartment in Paris. She spends the day going to cafes and bars, but must be careful which ones she chooses because some she’s not welcome in some anymore or feels too embarrassed to visit others again. Casual conversations with strangers at nearby tables often end in open sobbing or private tears in the lavatory. She appeals to friends in England for money and walks around in an expensive fur coat which is a remnant from a happier time. Disconsolate, lost in memories, contemplating suicide and paranoid that men want to take advantage of her, she drinks her evenings away or retreats into her apartment. The reader doesn’t know at first what’s brought her to this bleak existence and it seems equally mysterious to Sasha herself: “I am asking myself all the time what the devil I am doing here. All the time.” But over the course of the novel scenes from the past gradually emerge leading to a rough picture of how her life became so broken. This extremely dark eloquently written novel is a fascinating portrait of someone clinging to life by her nails and reveals a quietly desperate layer of society.

Experiencing Sasha’s account of her daily life it’s almost alarming how close the reader is drawn into her consciousness. Reality becomes subtly distorted so even inanimate objects like the room she lives in or the mirrors in public toilets speak to her and mock her. People seem wary of her realizing how tormented she is by her appearance. But she refutes that her sombre exterior adequately shows who she really is: “it isn't my face, this tortured and tormented mask. I can take it off whenever I like and hang it up on a nail. Or shall I place on it a tall hat with a green feather, hang a veil on the lot, and walk about the dark streets so merrily?” She expresses how the way we present ourselves preened, adorned with stylish clothing and wearing smiles is the real artifice which hides internal strife. It becomes her mission to cover her grief through this method and it becomes a personal mission to get a chic haircut and buy a new hat. Having made herself presentable she meets and makes dates with a pair of Russians and a mysterious man named Rene. She’s also drawn further into memories of her past and an intense romance/marriage she had with a man named Enno. The disappointment, strife and grief accompanying these thoughts of the past flood her present leading her to reason “No, life is too sad; it’s quite impossible.”

As gloomy as Sasha’s life is there is a cruel humour which is threaded throughout the novel. Trips to the cinema make the drama of life seem bitterly ironic and lead her to fits of hysterical laughter. She recounts how hopeless she was in jobs, particularly working in a clothes shop. Her nervousness doesn’t allow her to speak up when she should and leaves her helpless to the mockery of her employer. Again she projects her feelings into inanimate objects even expressing jealousy about how beautifully presented and frightening a group of porcelain dolls in the shop are: “I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women.” Gradually over the book I began feeling a sense of liberation in the narrator’s unrelenting bleakness and frustration over her beleaguered situation.

Sasha reasons that people’s optimism for the future despite life’s tragedies is based on a falsehood: “It’s not that these things happen or even that one survives them, but what makes life strange is that they are forgotten. Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies. This is what makes life so droll – the way you forget, and every day is a new day, and there’s hope for everybody, hooray…” With a wry sense of humour, she feels it’s only through our capacity to forget or bury virulent emotional response that makes life bearable. However, she is someone who can’t bury or cover her loss because it keeps rising to the surface of her consciousness. There’s a strange comfort in knowing that private sorrow which can haunt you throughout the day is shared by someone else. Sasha also realizes she is not alone in her pain as she meets others whose lives have fallen into ruin or a woman named Lise who actually hopes for another war so that she might be killed.

The ending of this short, compact novel makes an interesting contrast to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Sasha cries “Yes” like Molly Bloom. However, instead of this being an affirmation and welcome of the various joys of life, Sasha’s “yes” invites degradation and destruction into the guarded personal space she’s created. Early on she states “A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that's all any room is.” but after failing to meaningfully reconnect with the pleasures in life she invites those wolves inside. Because of the novel’s overwhelmingly solemn content, it’s probably not surprising that some people assumed Jean Rhys committed suicide after publishing “Good Morning, Midnight” in 1939.

After a decade of steadily producing four novels and short stories, she withdrew from the public eye and didn’t publish anything else until more than twenty five years later. It was only in 1949 when a theatrical presentation of “Good Morning, Midnight” was created did someone manage to track Rhys down by placing a newspaper advertisement. This renewed interest in her writing reinvigorated Rhys to finally produce more work. It’s interesting to consider if this hadn’t occurred and “Good Morning, Midnight” remained as her final mostly-forgotten novel because the publication of Rhys’ final tremendous novel “Wide Sargasso Sea” seems to have cemented a place for her in the literary canon. Yet “Good Morning, Midnight” is an extraordinary piece of modernist literature which artfully aligns the reader with the consciousness of a traumatized individual and powerfully deals with psychological issues in a revelatory style of writing. I’m grateful it wasn’t forgotten and it’s wonderful that a new Penguin Pockets edition has ensured that this fascinating novel is still read.

You can read an opening section from “Good Morning, Midnight” - www.pocketpenguins.com/good-morning-midnight

I’m delighted that Jessica Harrison, Senior Commissioning Editor for Penguin Classics, answered some questions I asked her about this exceptional novel.

What made you decide to include “Good Morning, Midnight” in the new Pocket Penguins series over her other novels such as “Wide Sargasso Sea” which is arguably her best known novel?

With this series, we wanted to shine a light on some of the books from the Classics list that we love but other readers might not have discovered yet. We also wanted to include a range of voices from different cultures and places. Many people have read Wide Sargasso Sea, but haven’t yet encountered any of Rhys’s other brilliant works, and Good Morning Midnight is a great place to go next.

After “Good Morning, Midnight” was first published in 1939 Jean Rhys didn’t publish another book until 1966. What might have led to such a gap in her literary output?

Rhys’s life was very difficult for many years. Having lived in Paris and moved in literary circles, she moved in 1939 with her husband to Devon, and drifted away from the publishing world. Over the next two decades, she suffered from health problems, her second husband died and then her third husband was imprisoned for fraud, which meant she followed him from prison to prison as he was moved around. It wasn’t until 1958 that she was rediscovered by the literary world. Diana Athill then became her editor, and was hugely important in encouraging her to complete Wide Sargasso Sea over a period of many years. By the time the book was published and became so famous, Rhys was an old woman. 

Do you think of “Good Morning, Midnight” as continuation of Rhys’ first three novels or does it stand entirely on its own?

I think it’s definitely a continuation in many respects. Sophia Jansen is clearly another iteration of the heroines of the first three novels – the desperate, rootless woman Rhys returned to obsessively in her work. By this stage, though, Rhys was fully in control of her material and style, and able to render Sophia’s situation more vividly and acutely than ever before.

Rhys was conversant with other writers of her generation and she’s now loosely grouped among modernist writers of the early 20th century. What stylistic elements of “Good Morning, Midnight” group her in that category of literature and does the novel stand apart in any way?

For one thing, Rhys is a great writer of the city and of walking the city, like other modernists such as Virginia Woolf or Dorothy Richardson. Her focus on the subjective and psychological experience of her characters could also be seen as typically modernist. But she is always her own writer, and I doubt she herself would want to be grouped with any one movement or category. When you read anything by her – be it one of her short stories, her novels or her brilliant unfinished autobiography Smile Please – you immediately know you’re in Rhys-land and nowhere else: a world of shabby hotel rooms, unsuitable love affairs, hunger and alcohol that is always beautifully rendered in her understated prose style.

Reading “Good Morning, Midnight” now some of its themes and content still feel quite shocking. For instance, the way it powerfully confronts issues about suicide, alcoholism, social anxiety, post-partum depression. Do you think these issues are any less risqué now than at the time of its first publication?

I think these themes are much less shocking today than they would have been in 1939, especially in a novel by a woman. But what still has the power to shock today is Rhys’s brutal honesty, and the uncompromising way she confronts these issues. No matter how painful the subject, the writing always feels so truthful you can’t look away.

Jean Rhys Reading Week Begins!

Listen to Jean Rhys speaking about writing.

Welcome to #ReadingRhys, a week centred on reading and discussing the work of Jean Rhys, now considered one the greatest writers of the 20th century! You can read a little more about her here in these articles from The Guardian and The Paris Review.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this week Jacqui (of JacquiWine’s Journal) and I have teamed up to coordinate discussions centred around Rhys’ writing and life. Having read much of Rhys’ work while I was at university, I’ve been eager to revisit her fascinating books which are distinct for their unique style and brutal honesty. Jacqui, Poppy Peacock (who writes about books at poppy peacock pens) and Margaret Reardon (another long-standing Rhys fan) and I will post about all of Jean Rhys’ major books over the course of the week. During her lifetime, Rhys published five novels: Quartet (1929); After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930); Voyage in the Dark (1934); Good Morning, Midnight (1939); and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She also wrote several short stories – a number of collections have been issued and are still available to buy secondhand if you’re willing to hunt around. There’s a series of letters too, plus Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.

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How to join in

Ideally we’d love you to read something by Rhys (or a book connected to her work) and then to share your thoughts about it via one or more of the following routes:
•    If you have a blog, you could write your own review or article about the book
•    Alternatively, share your thoughts on GoodReads. We’ve set up a ‘Jean Rhys Reading Week’ Group on GoodReads with a discussion topic for each book and her life
•    Tweet about it on Twitter using the hashtag #ReadingRhys
•    Add your comments to other readers’/bloggers’ reviews/posts which will be going up throughout the week (see the below schedule)

You can post your reviews and comments at any time from 12th-18th September, it’s entirely up to you. Plus, we’ll be happy to continue to discuss all things Rhys in the weeks that follow the event, particularly if you run short of time over the next few days.

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What we’ll post about this week

To give you an idea of what each of us will be focusing on, here’s a schedule for the reviews/posts we are planning to issue during the week. These are the books we’ll be taking a lead on.

Monday 12th September
•    Welcome to #ReadingRhys, plans for the week + After Leaving Mr Mackenzie – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)
•    Welcome to #ReadingRhys, plans for the week + Good Morning, Midnight – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Tuesday 13th
•    Voyage in the Dark – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Wednesday 14th
•    Tigers are Better-Looking (short stories) – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)
Thursday 15th
•    Wide Sargasso Sea – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
•    Quartet – Poppy (at poppy peacock pens)
Friday 16th
•    An interview with a special guest – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)
Saturday 17th
•    Good Morning, Midnight – Margaret (at newedition.ca)
•    Smile Please – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Sunday 18th
•    Rhys’ Letters: 1931-66 – Poppy (at poppy peacock pens)
•    The Left Bank (short stories) – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)

Between the four of us, we’ll be taking responsibility for visiting your blogs, the relevant GoodReads threads and reading comments on Twitter etc. At the end of the week, we’ll pull together some brief summaries of everyone’s responses to the books with a view to posting these on our blogs and the GoodReads group area during w/c 19th September.

So that’s the plan for the week. You can post your reviews and comments at any time, and we’ll visit when we can. Do add this bannerto your own posts as and when they go up and feel free to add it your blog if you’re planning to participate. Please use the #ReadingRhys hashtag in any Twitter comms about the event.

We’re really looking forward to discussing Rhys’ work and we hope you will join us during the week. Please feel free to add a link to your post(s) in the comments below. In the meantime, if you have any particular thoughts or plans for the week, just let us know. You can also get in touch with us via Twitter. We tweet at @JacquiWine, @lonesomereader, @poppypeacock and @2daffylou.

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Win a special Jean Rhys Prize Bundle!

As luck would have it, Penguin have recently reissued Rhys’ novel Good Morning, Midnight as part of their brightly-coloured Pocket Penguins series. You can read the first chapter of this brilliant novel here. As a special incentive to join in #ReadingRhys week, Jacqui and I will select one lucky person who makes a significant contribution to our discussions over the week to win a special Jean Rhys Package (courtesy of Penguin)!

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride

I can still vividly remember the experience of reading Eimear McBride’s astounding debut “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing”. I was so confused initially and then utterly enthralled by its innovative voice. It plays with language and sentence structures so radically it takes a while to catch on to the level of narrative and, in fact, it helps to read the text aloud to catch the rhythm of what McBride is doing.

Her much-anticipated follow up “The Lesser Bohemians” begins in exactly the same way. For the first forty pages I was befuddled and had to read carefully to follow all the possible meaning McBride packs into her phrasing. Then my reading pace really picked up because I grew accustomed to McBride’s unique writing and got really stuck into the story of 18 year-old Eily who moves from Ireland to London in 1994 to study acting and work as a performer. She becomes enamoured with actor Stephen who is twice her age and they embark on a tumultuous and heated love affair. This is a first love story devoid of sentimentality. Instead, what McBride conveys is the complex intensity, raw passion and emotionally transformative experience of a relationship. 

It’s easy to trip up on McBride’s prose style, but it has a poetic beauty and if you take the time to unpack all that she’s saying it’s extremely rewarding. Take for instance this line about how the protagonist finds herself silenced in a social situation because of nerves: “I wish that I was someone else, a girl with words behind her face, not this one done up like a stone in herself.” It’s a really emotionally-charged way of describing common feelings of introversion. There is a lot in each sentence because, not only does McBride capture in her writing what her characters are thinking, but how they think and the experience of thought combined with action filtered through a particular sensibility.

It’s interesting how only the sections from Eily’s perspective use McBride’s quick-paced prose style, but partway through the novel we’re given Stephen’s narrative about his past as he tells it to Eily during an emotional night. The language of his extended confession about his past is written in a much more straightforward way. This comes as a relief in some ways because his back story is so complicated and unsettling I was glad it was written out clearly. Not since reading “A Little Life” have I read such a moving account of a boy’s abuse and the damaging way it affects his entire life. Stephen describes the complicate feelings which accompany his participation in being sexually abused: “wondering if the real truth was that I’d enjoyed or invited it because physically I did… and once that happens it’s like you’re implicated, like you’re an accomplice somehow.” This gets to the core of how some abuse can engender a wall of silence around it. It’s also interesting how his experiences play against Eily’s own troubled childhood which we only find out about in cryptic pieces from her recollections and exchanges with Stephen.

The original location of Foyles bookshop

Balanced with the darker aspects of the story are lighter anecdotes which centre around the theatre scene of mid-90s London. She memorably evokes the landscape and social atmosphere of the time. I particularly liked a description of the old-style Foyles bookstore on Charing Cross Road (which has since been closed and moved down the road to a chic modern version of the bookstore). She notes how there is “No kissing in Foyles… I Anthony Burgess over my mouth.” These descriptions which convey both the comic action of their romantic encounter in the bookstore juxtaposed with the pretention of the literary allusions for this precocious theatre student made me chuckle.

Most of all “The Lesser Bohemians” so powerfully evokes a heart wrenching sense of the absolute all-consuming tumult caused by a difficult love affair. It feels emotionally honest and represents the interplay between sex and fantasy unlike any other account I’ve read before. She shows how strongly our past plays into our relationships. When reading about people’s hectic affairs it can sometimes grow tedious because (from the outside) it all feels a bit dull. But McBride’s prose are ideally suited to conveying the real physical excitement and crushing despair that her protagonist feels. So when reading a line such as “Cannot bear to think of him. OR sit amid the lost teeth look of my room.” I felt like I was fully with her and shared in her sense of anger/pain/desolation. This is a spectacularly accomplished novel that ineluctably draws you into the life and breath of its characters.

The Man Booker Prize 2016 Shortlist Predictions

It’s been a busy month for me since the longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize was announced so I’ve only managed to read five of the novels on the list. However, since I did so badly at predicting the longlist, I hope to redeem myself by making a guess at the six books which will make the shortlist. The novel that has really stood out for me is Madeleline Thien’s “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” - a majestic sprawling saga about a family’s experiences in Mao’s China and a girl’s quest to understand her lost father’s past. I really hope this makes the list!

I also loved reading both Ian McGuire and Wyl Menmuir’s novels, but I don’t think they’ll make the cut. “The North Water” was such a fantastic adventure story filled with rich descriptions. And “The Many” is an intense, eerie read which eventually turns quite emotional.

I had previously read Deborah Levy’s novel “Hot Milk” and love the oddball perspective it gives on personal drive in life and relationships/sexuality. Elizabeth Strout’s “My Name is Lucy Barton” is a brilliantly pared down description of a life and how a woman has grown to create her own identity far from her upbringing.

I still haven’t read “The Sellout”, “The Schooldays of Jesus” or “Hystopia” but I’ve heard such high praise for all of them that I think they’ll be on the list. I figure that the judges will always want to have a famous, known name on the list so J.M. Coetzee is assured a place. Although I’ve heard some strong criticism of it, I’m also really eager to still read A.L. Kennedy’s “Serious Sweet” as I’ve loved her writing so much in the past.

Here are my six guesses for the shortlist. Click on the titles for my full reviews.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleline Thien
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
Hystopia by David Means

The official Man Booker Prize 2016 shortlist will be announced next Tuesday, September 13th at 10:30AM followed by a fabulous prize event being held at the Serpentine Pavilion in London which I’ve been invited to. So I’ll be very excited to see which books make the list and which authors/judges are in attendance. The winner will be announced on October 25th so I hope to read all of whatever books make the actual list by that time.

Have you read many/any on the longlist? Who do you hope will make the shortlist?

Augustown by Kei Miller

How do we read about characters so radically different from ourselves without bringing our own assumptions into the story? It’s the same challenge we face walking down any street and encountering someone who appears to be from a different class, race, gender, sexual orientation, social group or religion. It’s something I loved about reading Petina Gappah’s novel “The Book of Memory” earlier this year. In this book she challenges the lazy way we divide people up into categories as if they must inevitably be one particular thing. It’s these very categories which reinforce structures of imbalance in our society and prevent us from seeing people as infinitely more complex than any one aspect of their identity.

In his novel “Augustown” Kei Miller also asks us to question the assumptions we make about people. Central to this book is the story of an over-zealous teacher who cuts off a boy’s dreadlocks in his classroom. This is in a poor neighbourhood school in the fictional city of Augustown in Jamaica and this incident sparks off a dramatic event that gets the whole town marching. Built around this story are stories characters tell each other. These tales span back many years and involve a range of dynamic and vividly-realized characters from a cleaner prone to delusions to a pot-bellied Governor to a down-and-out man locked up in a madhouse who goes on to lead a revolt as a flying holy man. Using poetic language and a rigorous intelligence, Miller builds layered, intriguing, interweaving tales of the people from Augustown showing how the past is linked with the present. The effect is utterly absorbing for the secrets that are revealed and fascinating for the way his ideas make you stop and think.

The novel shows how highly politicised gradations of skin colour are in Jamaica. Some people attempt to attach themselves to individuals of a higher class and/or lighter skin colour to elevate themselves out of a perceived lower class skin colour. One man reasons “Marriage to her would be an exaltation at last out of the blackness to which some unobservant people thought he belonged.” The story also shows how Rastafarians rebelled against this and the character of Alexander Bedward initiates a movement to fight against connections between class/social status and skin colour. The popular Bedwardism mantra is “there is a white wall and a black wall, but the black wall is growing bigger and will crush the white wall.” The stories show how the external and internalized racism becomes untenable at certain points of history causing emotional acts of rebellion.

Although there are many characters and stories being told, the overarching story is always tightly controlled by a narrator who guides the reader through this community and its history. It’s only near the end of the novel that the narrator’s identity is revealed. At some points through the story the narrator’s voice comes to the forefront actively commenting upon how the reader might interpret the story. One of the most memorable instances is when the narrator references times where characters in the story fly and it’s stated: “Look, this isn’t ‘magic realism’. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. NO. You won’t get off so easy. This is a story about people as real as you are, and as real as I once was before I became a bodiless thing floating up here in the sky. You may as well stop to consider a more urgent question, not whether you believe in this story or not, but if this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.” It’s true that the literary style of magical realism has become entwined with notions of folklore and underdeveloped nations. Reading certain stories and branding them with this classification can dilute the power literature has to connect us with other people’s real experiences.

Later this notion is reiterated when commenting upon the storytellers of a community: “The great philosophical questions goes: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?... If a man flies in Jamaica, and only the poor will admit to seeing it, has he still flown?... Always – always – there are witnesses.” There are aspects of history we remain wilfully deaf to because they occur outside of our own socio-economic circle. Stories that come from people within other circles might be dismissed because the teller can be discounted as invalid or irrelevant. This novel encourages us to really listen to and respect the testimonies of individuals whose stories we are prone to dismissing because of difference.

It’s artful the way Miller balances his powerful ideas with a plethora vibrant storytelling. “Augustown” is an elegantly written and engrossing book.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler (translated by Charlotte Collins)

It’s my birthday today and my tradition is to read a book I’ve never got around to reading but always wanted to. I’ve been doing this for many years now. This year I picked off my shelf a novel I heard great things about when it was first published in English last year and that I bought earlier this year at the newly opened bookshop Libreria. “A Whole Life” by Robert Seethaler feels like the perfect novel to read on a birthday because of the brief intense panoramic view of a life that it gives. Using straightforward prose, it recounts mountain man Andreas Egger’s life throughout the early twentieth century. He lives through a difficult childhood, love, war and the development of the barren slopes around him into a fully inhabited holiday village. It’s an extremely meditative novel which patiently considers through the eyes of a man with simple values and simple aspirations what’s most important in life.

The story begins with Egger trying to rescue a dying man named Horned Hannes from his hut. As he begins carrying him on his back towards the village the old man slips off and runs into a blizzard. What becomes of him isn’t uncovered until many years later at a point when Egger has experienced all the pleasures, pains, disappointments and contentment that life can give. Hannes acts as a kind of double through whom Egger can think of all the possibilities in life he didn’t pursue. It’s observed that “In his life he too, like all people, had harboured ideas and dreams. Some he had fulfilled for himself; some had been granted to him. Many things had remained out of reach, or barely had he reached them than they were torn from his hands. But he was still here.” In a way, it feels too simple to say we experience regret or disappointment when considering the paths we’ve not taken in life. This retrospective view of life is at once more complex and more simple than that. Things turned out the way that they have and our continued existence is all that matters.

It’s especially interesting how the novel looks at Egger’s work life. As a hardy muscular man, he spends many years doing manual labour laying foundations for the growth of the countryside around him. His manager points out that “You can buy a man’s hours off him, you can steal his days from him, or you can rob him of his whole life, but no one can take away from any man so much as a single moment. That’s the way it is.” What I take from this is that although we spend the majority of our lives labouring to earn a living, this work doesn’t define us. Our moment to moment experiences and thoughts are who we are. We posses this outside of whatever job it is we do all year and there’s a sort of comfort in owning that.

The first time Egger sees a TV he sees Grace Kelly waving and thinks she's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen.

There is a quiet, considered nobility to this novel. For the deep impression it makes, it’s remarkably compressed. I found something movingly dignified in Egger’s mostly solitary life and the way the narrative focuses so intensely on his circumscribed experience outside of the politics or large scale changes happening around him. The movement of time in this novel reflects how you witness the world changing around you, but in some essential way you feel like the person you always were. So it can be surprising when you see physical changes to familiar places. Later in his life Egger might walk past a place where his house once stood or glance at a television to see a man stepping on the moon. It’s a testimony that society and the world around you is moving on, but you’re still here older but essentially the same.

It’s difficult not to get reflective on birthdays, especially now that social media can allow such quick easy contact with the majority of people who have been most important to you in your life. While I read about the full span of Egger’s long simple and passionate life in the mountains I received a stream of notices on my phone from friends and family wishing me happy birthday. It gave me a funny awareness of how you can be so solitary, but still exist in the net of other people’s lives. Egger oftentimes felt very much alone, but he was a presence who existed in the consciousness of people around him. Despite all the hardships and conflict in life, there’s a stoic beauty in just existing.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

At the beginning of Madeleine Thien's majestically epic novel “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” we meet Li-ling, a girl of Chinese descent whose family live in Canada. Her father Jiang Kai left in 1989 when she was ten years old to travel to Hong Kong where he eventually committed suicide. Li-ling can't begin to understand the full complexity of why her father chose to end his life until meeting Ai-ming, a young woman who leaves China after the historic student protests in Tiananmen Square which resulted in hundreds (if not thousands) of civilian deaths after martial law was declared. From Ai-ming's stories about her family and particularly her father Sparrow who was a musical student taught by Kai in Mao's communist China, Li-Ling embarks on a lifelong search for the truth about her father and the country her family came from. This ambitious novel spans fifty years of China's history recounting the heartrending impact the political system has upon a fascinating artistic family.

Li-Ling's journey of discovery is spread out over the novel. She notes how “It’s taken me years to begin searching, to realize that the days are not linear, that time does not simply move forward but spirals closer and closer to a shifting centre.” Reflecting this structure of time, the majority of the story refers back to earlier periods in the family's development. Although this felt somewhat confusing at first given the large cast of characters the story eventually became much easier to follow. It's engrossing reading how strong characters like Ai-ming's grandmother Big Mother Knife, a translator named The Lady Dostoevsky and Comrade Glass Eye survive through or manipulate a repressive system to come through and get what they want.

Because information is actively suppressed or destroyed by the Red Guards, documents accumulate significant value ensuring the people's stories and culture are preserved. A character called Old Cat states “All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from the universe, but on and on we copy.” The significant Book of Records is a document which is painstakingly hand copied to be passed along through generations, across continents and periods of strife. It's an epic tale told in parts which has been broken up and scattered during the social and political upheaval of Chairman Mao’s revolutionized China. But it also represents the embodiment of our culture, the stories which cannot be forgotten though many people prefer to forget them or would actively try to silence them. Encoded within the handwritten variations of this book are the stories of the people who proceed it. Thien's story recounts the dramatic lengths to which the characters seek ‘To escape and continue this story, to make infinite copies, to let these stories permeate the soil, invisible and undeniable.’

The book also shows how there is a special freedom in music to express emotion and personal history in a way words can't. Thien writes how “Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.” The Chinese censors can't strictly interpret the music that the characters produce as anti-revolutionary, but they can stop it by branding it as a bourgeois luxury. Sparrow is a talented composer who is forced to work for many years in a factory. It's tragic reading about how his and many other people's natural talents are suppressed and squandered for the sake of a strict system focused on organized industrial production.

Thien has a particularly beautiful way of writing about the way music affects her characters. When Sparrow hears Bach he feels that “the notes collided into him. They ran up and down his spine, and seemed to dismantle him into a thousand pieces of the whole, where each part was more complete and more alive than his entire self had ever been.” It's moving how music reaches the characters on an emotional level freeing them from their particular circumstances. Sparrow's niece Zhuli feels “Inside her head, the music built columns and arches, it cleared a space within and without, a new consciousness. So there were worlds buried inside other worlds but first you had to find the opening and the entryway.” It's inspiring how the characters need for this music supersedes the dictates of the political system that tries to suppress it so sheets of music are hidden beneath floorboards waiting to be resurrected and played again at some later point.

Bach on a Chinese stamp

Frequent references are made to Russian composers and the stories of the musicians involved in this novel in some ways parallel the difficulty these Russian artists experienced under their own communist system. Earlier this year I read Julian Barnes' “The Noise of Time” where he brought Shostakovich to life and showed how music is an art form capable of triumphing over time. Zhuli plays the music of Prokfiev, a “disgraced Russian” and this makes a beautiful touchstone between two characters living under repressive political systems separated by space and time who find freedom and expression in music.

“Do Not Say We Have Nothing” builds to the agonizingly brutal instance of the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Having experienced the lives of this family through all the social and political developments of the country proceeding this tragedy, it's context and meaning is brought much more vividly to life. It shows the complexity and enormous scale of the protest. Big Mother observes how “In this country, rage had no place to exist except deep inside, turned against oneself.” After years of suppression, feelings which had been turned inward are brought violently out into the open. This novel is a tremendously enlightening and immersive story told with great skill and poetic beauty.

Hide by Matthew Griffin

For gay people like me, it’s disheartening growing up without seeing examples of long term same-sex love reflected in the books we read and the films we watch – never mind seeing it actually realized in the world around us. I was raised in rural Maine where there were few gay people. It was extremely difficult to come out of the closet although I consider myself lucky to have known supportive people and I had a much easier time than many. If I'd been born ten years earlier it would have been much more difficult. During my teenage years in the mid-90s I became sexually aware and eagerly looked for stories about various kinds of queer experience. However, the majority of examples I saw on television/films or read about in novels were comically-presented/hopelessly-single camp men or “deviants” who endlessly cruised without settling down, died from AIDS related illnesses and could not experience any real romance that didn’t end in bleak tragedy. These stories needed to be told (as long as they were told sensitively). But how could I envision a love life for myself based only on examples of broken romance? Matthew Griffin's beautiful debut novel “Hide” tells a story that I hungered for as a teen: a layered and nuanced lifelong romance between two men. But this is more than simply a gay romance; it's a novel about how love transforms over large stretches of time and the different roles partners play during difficult periods of life.

Frank and Wendell meet after WWII in North Carolina. Frank served in the war and Wendell works as a taxidermist. Amidst their burgeoning romance within a small community, they are aware of the dangerous consequences if they were to be open about their feelings for each other. Instead of risking familial rejection, public condemnation, possible imprisonment and/or psychiatric institutionalization they choose to retreat to an extremely isolated house in the country and never allow anyone to know that they are together. When they must be seen together they pretend to be brothers. An incident like the occurs at the novel's beginning when Frank who is in his eighties collapses in their garden from heart trouble. Told from Wendell's perspective, we see over the course of the novel the heart-wrenching struggle as Frank continues to deteriorate both mentally and physically. Interspersed with the increasing strain of their daily lives are accounts of their relationship over the decades and the sacrifices they've made isolating themselves from the rest of society.

Amidst descriptions about Wendell's profession stuffing animals there are some strikingly memorable images of the body's physical reality and the emotional resonance of dealing with it. This leads to some arresting statements about the surface of things: “It's the skin and the skin alone that makes any of us worthy of love or kindness. Underneath it we are monsters, every living thing.” There is something profoundly beautiful and sombre about revelations made from working with the body and what this means for identity in the case of Frank's condition. Griffin is bracingly honest about the stress caused from the slow physical/mental breakdown of ageing and the antagonism it creates. It's so skilful how he shows the power of their relationship not only through moments of moving tenderness but in the intimate forms of cruelty which can only be enacted by a couple who really love each other.

The extreme discretion of their relationship requires them to say very little about themselves to anyone outside of their carefully guarded circumscribed domestic life. They find that “The best lies, we’d learned, don’t ask you to say a word. They practically tell themselves.” This anonymity prevents them from fully engaging with their communities but also cuts them off from their families. At one point during their many years together Frank's aunt attempts to make contact with him as he is her favourite nephew, but Frank staunchly deflects any chance for a meaningful connection even when it seems she might be sympathetic to the truth of their situation. He decides the risk is too great.

Their reclusive life not only requires losing out on family life but also any lasting record of their love. At one point Wendell realizes “when we’re gone, nobody will remember any of it. Nobody will see our photos and marvel that we, too, were young once; nobody will wonder about the things we never told them. It will be as if none of it ever happened.” It's a grave tragedy that their love story can't be a part of the narrative of their families or society. It's lost to succeeding generations. Many gay boys like me would have felt less alone growing up knowing that someone from a previous generation in my family had been in a same-sex relationship. A simple photograph of two men from the past with their arms romantically around each other would have been a profound revelation.

It's a worthy task of novelists today to reclaim the love experienced by previous generations of gay people through imaginative stories. It inserts back into our culture what must have happened but what we can never know about because it could only exist in silence. A series of authors have differently approached this in their recent writing from Patrick Gale's “A Place Called Winter” to Sjon's “Moonstone”. Matthew Griffin's extremely moving book is a wonderful addition to this burgeoning canon of literature. “Hide” is an elegantly written and powerful novel. It's important that succeeding generations of gay people have more stories like this.

Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

Last month I responded to the Try a Story TAG on Youtube to read the first story of five different collections and “Vertigo” was one of them. Whether “Vertigo” is a book of stories or a novel is something which could be debated. Many of the sections/chapters/stories follow a woman at various stages in her life: travelling without her husband, dealing with her mother's death, attending an engagement as an esteemed professional. It might be the same character or different women. Few personal details or names are given, yet Joanna Walsh gets at the heart of her protagonist's life so that you feel immediately involved in her story. She does this through an innovative and compelling style which shifts your perspective to let you see the fully rounded truth of emotional experience. These finely-crafted vignettes give a refreshing and sometimes startling perspective on our ever-shifting identities.

There is a fascinating attention to physical detail and space throughout this book. Quite often there will be descriptions about the exact placement between the narrator and other people in a cafe she might happen to be in, the dynamics of the room and the environment outside. It's as if the protagonist is desperately trying to establish a presence wherever she's located in order to affirm and better understand her place within and relationship to the world. This is similar to when we're trying to comfort someone when they are upset by saying “There there.” This is a way of conveying “You are there” or “You are not lost.” These spatial descriptions often occur in instances when there is reason for the character to be highly distressed such as knowing that her husband might be having an affair or waiting for news about a sick child's prognosis.

Walsh's use of space extends from the physical world to the interior. She writes about the sky and water as a reflective surface. A woman window shops in Paris and it's noted of the clothing on display: “come December the first wisps of lace and chiffon will appear and with them bottomless skies reflected blue in mirror swimming pools.” It makes me think about how we try to reflect each other in style and dress, how we try to present ourselves as one thing until we begin to believe that the presentation is the reality and how people only see the exterior but sometimes see hints of untold depth. Later in ‘Summer Story’ it's observed that “there were puddles that looked deep and reflected the sunwashed sky.” These images create a strong sense of the physical world as well as building a meaningful feeling for how social personality is constructed.

In ‘Claustrophobia' there is a sense in which family is both a comfort and a thing of dread. Walsh has an interesting way of approaching the concept of home where she states “Home is a rehearsal, by which I mean a repetition like in French: both what’s behind the curtain and in front of it, a cherry cake studded with the same surprise on repeat. It confirms itself; it must confirm itself.” It's challenging to think of home as not the main event but a repeated series of actions and reactions to create consistency. Eventually we begin to believe that the comforts of domestic bliss are not a construct but real or an inevitability. When this is not confirmed, when members of that home go off script (as they do in some stories where there is family illness or a wife discovers her husband has been meeting women online) then these well ordered, repeated narratives of daily life become severely disrupted. The title story ‘Vertigo’ speaks powerfully about the fear of settling into domestic happiness. Yet the final story 'Drowning' seems to suggest that its only through a flirtation with the infinite alternative possibilities of life that we can find real comfort in making a home.

It's interesting that I happen to be rereading Jean Rhys' books at the moment because the tone of many of these stories is somewhat similar to her novels. Walsh frequently gives a wry look at the hard facts of life whether its a narrator noticing the ironically cheery images on the outfit of a medical profession or a beleaguered woman in Paris looking for affirmation in the admittedly superficial pleasure of clothes shopping. In particular ‘Summer Story’ shows a woman who knowingly debases herself in a search for affection and passion: “With all the time I have, I could learn a language, I could read a book, I could write a book. In the end I walk nowhere and the wind gets up wand the rain starts and it is still too early to go to his party.” There is a keen sense of aimless wandering which the narrator knows can't build to anything meaningful and putting faith in possibilities which she knows will bear no fruit.

Perspective shifts from story to story so that we see the central woman or women from different angles. This shift changes the feeling between each section so it's sometimes painfully intimate or at other times more objectively detached. One of the most comic stories ‘Young Mothers’ takes a satirical edge on motherhood in a way similar to Helen Ellis' hilarious book “American Housewife” from earlier this year: “we looked after our young selves, awarding ourselves little treats – cakes, glasses of juice or wine – never too much.” It's narrated in the collective which is a perfectly suited format to convey how these new mothers unite to infantilize themselves as a way of halting the process of ceding youth to the next generation they've created.

“Vertigo” frequently makes you linger on certain lines to consider the possible interpretations and the full impact what's being said. It's artful how this doesn't disrupt the flow of each section or story but allows you to engage with the emotional dilemmas more fully. This is a strikingly original, thoughtful and creatively executed book.

Plans for Jean Rhys Reading Week & Book Giveaway

Last month I posted an announcement about the Jean Rhys Reading Week that will be taking place from Monday 12th to Sunday 18th September. In essence, it’s a week centred on reading and discussing the work of this remarkable writer.

During her lifetime, Rhys published five novels: Quartet (1929); After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931); Voyage in the Dark (1934); Good Morning, Midnight (1939); and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She also wrote several short stories – a number of collections have been issued and are still available to buy secondhand if you’re willing to hunt around. There is a series of letters too, plus Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.

The wonderful Jacqui who blogs so insightfully about books at JacquiWine’s Journal kindly invited me to co-host the reading week with her. Poppy Peacock (who writes about books at poppy peacock pens) and Margaret Reardon (another long-standing Rhys fan) will also be helping us with a couple of activities during the week. Between the four of us, we’re planning to cover pretty much all of Rhys’ work to give a broad view of her oeuvre. We’d love as many readers as possible to get involved by reading one of more of Rhys’ books (or even a relevant biography).

With a few weeks to go before the start of the week, here is an overview of what will be happening during the week and how you can get involved. Ideally we’d love you to read something by Rhys (or a book connected to her work) and then to share your thoughts about it via one or more of the following routes:

•    If you have a blog, you could write a review or article about the book and post it there.
•    Alternatively, share your thoughts on GoodReads. We’ve set up a ‘Jean Rhys Reading Week’ Group on GoodReads with a discussion topic for each book, plus one on Rhys’ life
•    Tweet about it on Twitter using the hashtag #ReadingRhys
•    Add your comments to other readers’/bloggers’ reviews/posts which will be going up throughout the week

You can post your reviews and comments at any time from 12th-18th September, it’s entirely up to you.

To give you an idea of what each of us will be focusing on, here’s a schedule for the reviews/posts we are planning to issue during the week.

#ReadingRhys Schedule:

Monday 12th September
•    Welcome to #ReadingRhys, plans for the week + After Leaving Mr Mackenzie – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)
•    Welcome to #ReadingRhys, plans for the week + Good Morning, Midnight – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Tuesday 13th
•    Voyage in the Dark - Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Wednesday 14th
•    Tigers are Better-Looking (short stories) - Jacqui (at JacquiWine's Journal)
Thursday 15th
•    Wide Sargasso Sea - Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
•    Quartet – Poppy (at poppy peacock pens)
Friday 16th
•   An interview with a special guest – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)
Saturday 17th
•    Good Morning, Midnight – Margaret (at newedition.ca)
•    Smile Please – Eric (at Lonesome Reader)
Sunday 18th
•    Rhys’ Letters: 1931-66 – Poppy (at poppy peacock pens)
•    The Left Bank (short stories) – Jacqui (at JacquiWine’s Journal)

Between the four of us, we’ll be taking responsibility for visiting your blogs, the relevant GoodReads threads and reading comments on Twitter etc. At the end of the week, we’ll pull together some brief summaries of everyone’s responses to the books with a view to posting these on our blogs and the GoodReads group area during w/c 19th September.

So that’s the plan for the week. You can post your reviews and comments at any time, and we’ll visit when we can. Do add the banner (near the top of this piece) to your own posts as and when they go up and feel free to add it your blog if you’re planning to participate. Please use the #ReadingRhys hashtag in any Twitter comms about the event.

Good Morning, Midnight Giveaway!

As a little incentive, we have 5 copies of the brand new Pocket Penguins edition of Good Morning, Midnight to giveaway. For a chance to win one of these prizes, please tell us what you’re planning to read for #ReadingRhys week by commenting below.

The giveaway will run until midnight on Thursday 25th August (UK time) after which time we will select five winners at random. It’s open to everyone worldwide, so please feel free to enter wherever you live. Do include a note of your contact details in your comments, either an email address or Twitter/GoodReads handle. Good luck!

We’re really looking forward to discussing Rhys’ work and we hope you will join us during the week.

In the meantime, if you have any comments, queries or suggestions for the Jean Rhys Reading Week (#ReadingRhys), please leave a comment here or get in touch with one of us via Twitter. We tweet at @JacquiWine, @lonesomereader, @poppypeacock and @2daffylou.

Happy #ReadingRhys!

The North Water by Ian McGuire

I’ve had a copy of “The North Water” for ages and part of me wishes I’d read it in the midst of winter to add atmosphere to the reading experience. It’s an immersive story so full of vivid descriptions it made me shiver as if I were trapped in a snowstorm and wrinkle my nose as if I could smell the pungency of sailors long at sea. This dramatic account of a treacherous ocean voyage follows a Yorkshire whaling ship, the Volunteer, as it journeys up the coast of Greenland into the arctic during the mid-1800s. An Irish surgeon named Patrick Sumner, who has a murky past working in the army in Delhi, joins the vessel’s crew as they set out to hunt whales and skin polar bears. But others on the crew have alternative motives for the voyage including Captain Brownlee, first mate Cavendish and a terrifyingly violent harpooner Henry Drax. As they journey into the treacherous iceberg-laden seas Patrick and the crew face perils both within and outside of their ship. This novel is a gripping adventure story of the highest order which gives a penetrating look into the darkest acts that men are capable of.

There are plenty of thrills, but it is not simply about heart-racing scenes. I think McGuire is doing something more sophisticated in this account of the strife his characters encounter when they venture out into the raw and untamed elements. Here a person’s identity is indelibly tied into their daily actions which involve life or death decision making. Patrick reasons that “Only actions count, he thinks for the ten thousandth time, only events.” It’s these events at sea which define these sailors’ identities. Rather than meditating on purpose or how to go forward in the future there is only meaning in how these men conduct themselves under highly pressured circumstances. Later Patrick reasons “It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission, it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage.” The test of will these sailors pit themselves against determines whether they survive and only then does life shape into meaning.

There is something wonderfully indulgent in McGuire’s powerful descriptions of the hyper-masculine environment of seafaring living. It’s full of gritty honesty about bodily smells and functions not to mention the hyper violence which is inextricably a part of hunting the ocean and arctic plains. Although it may turn a reader’s stomach at times it unquestionably makes the story come vibrantly alive. However, there are also lines of tremendous grace and beauty, especially when McGuire describes the landscape: “The black sky is dense with stars and upon its speckled blank, the borealis unfurls, bends back, reopens again like a vast and multi-coloured murmuration.”

The sailors also encounter communities of Inuit people in Greenland.

Since the majority of the novel takes place on the ship there are very few female characters. There is nothing polite or politically correct about these hard men whose language is full of racial invectives and disdain for women. It’s a pleasure when these men come under critique themselves such as the wonderful line: “Pigs grunt, ducks quack and men tell lies: that is how it generally goes.” Yet, the author skilfully draws distinctions between men who are ruled by selfish instinct and those who have more of a sensitivity and moral conscience. There’s also a refreshing representation of a homosexual sailor who is neither a “pansy” nor someone who suppresses/denies his sexuality, but finds himself in an extremely difficult situation when events take a dark turn.

Periodically throughout their journey Sumner reads from The Illiad. It’s interesting that he mediates upon this book rather than the Odyssey which is the journey he more inhabits. Yet, it’s appropriate as the character is plagued by memories of what happened during his time at war in Delhi. The victims in this story (whether they be people in war or animals slaughtered during hunts) take residence in the minds of the men who manage to survive these battlefields. It creates a haunting message about the transformation of personality when men are involved in the most harrowing conditions imaginable. This novel is a true experience: brutal and completely gripping.

Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

One of the reasons why this book blog is called LonesomeReader is I want it to be an ongoing exploration of what loneliness means. People who can be termed as introverted or shy have a tendency to feel greater degrees of loneliness as they aren’t able to easily connect to others or socialize as naturally as more extroverted groups. Many who feel this way think of themselves as indistinct and unnoticed, standing on the sidelines or a wallflower. “Harmless Like You” begins with Yuki, an adolescent girl living in New York City in the late 1960s. She’s someone who often holds her feelings inside, but they seep out in creative ways through different artistic mediums with how she experiences colour and sees the world in a distinct way. The novel flips between the decades of Yuki’s development as a person and artist and a time in 2016 when a young man named Jay travels to Germany to inform his estranged mother Yuki about his father’s death and the house that was left to her. Their stories combine to form a powerfully emotional tale about family connections, self esteem and personal expression.

As a girl, Yuki thinks of herself as so invisible that not even the perverted man who flashes women on the street notices her. Because she sees herself as so separate from others she feels she has no impact on them. But a quiet presence can have just as powerful or a greater effect than someone who makes themselves loudly known. Since she’s not able to express her feelings to people her silence sometimes acts as a destructive force towards others and herself. It leads to the dissolution of her relationships with her parents who move to Japan, her only childhood friend Odile who pursues a modelling career and a man who later tries to earnestly love her. There’s a moving scene after her first sexual experience when she recalls her father hitting her knuckles when she was forced to memorize poetry, but she’s not able to speak about this with her partner. Opportunities for nurturing emotional connections are lost because Yuki is unable to express how she feels.

Her silence also leads her to not tell anyone about the abuse she receives within a difficult destructive relationship. There are strong descriptions of how “she’d been knocked out of herself. A screaming ghost girl, with teeth of orange glass, hovered above the body.” Yuki develops a fractured sense of self which makes her emotionally withdraw even more from other people. Yet she pursues further techniques for trying to artistically render her complex feelings in painting and photographs. Looking at a photograph of civilian girl victims in Vietnam, Yuki’s partner remarks how they are harmless like her. This makes a deep impact on Yuki in how she is seen externally by some white Americans to be a completely benign presence. The novel shows a complex understanding of how passive people subtly enact their own influence.

Jay has a cat named Celeste. "The one thing a hairless cat shouldn't do is hairball."

Yuki’s son Jay is a new father who has inherited some of his mother’s traits. Emotional connections are difficult for him as well – especially with his newborn son of whom he remarks “I’d never dreamed of leaving my wife until this creature came into our lives.” He only achieves a sense of emotional stability in his connection with his elderly cat Celeste. Having never known his mother, he’s kept inside many feelings about her and their broken family until he travels to Germany to finally meet with her. This encounter allows for the possibility of more open emotional connections in both of their lives.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel contains a lot of moving descriptions of how colour relates to emotion. At times Yuki experiences a synaesthesia so when she’s taken to a movie cinema the buttered popcorn connects with her partner: “The sweet yellow smell was Lou.” Many chapter headings begin with a description of a particular colour and its complex meaning. In a similar fashion the way Yuki experiences colour tempers how she relates to and feels the world around her. This creates a sophisticated portrait of an artistic sensibility and the story cleverly shows the influence introverted personalities have upon the world. “Harmless Like You” is an extremely moving and imaginative novel.

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf

I read graphic books so rarely, but every time I do pick one up I wonder why I don’t read more. Maybe it’s because usually only the most acclaimed and, presumably, high quality ones reach me. Whatever the case, this first volume of Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir about his childhood growing up in Libya, Syria and France is absolutely mesmerising. It depicts his experiences under the parentage of his academic Syrian father Abdul-Razak and his French mother Clementine. His father’s ideals and pride about his heritage are complicated by the real world challenges he and his family encounter living under the rule of Gaddafi in early 80s Libya and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria a few years later. Gradually his principles change and he aspires to fashion his young blonde-haired son Riad into the Arab of the future.

Quite often the dialogue which accompanies illustrations of Riad’s experiences combine with very short snippets about political developments of the time. This intelligently puts these scenes in context and gives a welcome insight into the state the family lives under. Also, considering the father’s attitudes alongside our own historical knowledge about the outcome of some of the leaders and regimes he mentions makes this a bracing read. Sections of the book are shaded various colours to differentiate the nations that they are living in: blue for France, yellow for Libya, pink for Syria and (briefly) green for Jersey. I admired how these colours sync with Riad’s descriptions of the different environments of these various locations. The expressive design of the illustrations also beautifully reflect the emotional mood of the story – particularly during some vividly rendered dream sequences and a scene where Riad’s grandmother licks his eyes!

Wonderful touches of humour abound throughout this book including Clementine’s description of Georges Brassens as a French God leading Riad to visualise the singer every time someone mentions God to him. There are also sympathetic portraits of family relations and Riad’s impressions of a series of misfit or bullying other children. Some scenes depict chilling flashes of violence which springs up against animals and people. At other points a fascinating tension appears when the family comes under the sway of competing ideologies – particularly in the virulent anti-Israeli attitudes impressed upon children. For instance, toys Riad and two friends play with in Syria show the Syrian toy soldiers in heroic poses and the Israeli toy soldiers in treacherous poses. These attitudes demonstrate the growing conflict within Abdul-Razak of whom it’s noted “He said he wasn’t religious, but he constantly defended the Sunnis. According to him, the Sunnis were always right.” His cultural and national pride mingles with the dogmatic principles of religious doctrine so he comes to teach Riad things such as “Satan likes to hide inside women.” Reading about the father’s gradually transforming ideas makes me really tense to read how he will develop in the second volume of this graphic memoir.

“The Arab of the Future” is a tremendously engaging story of family life. It’s also a fascinating personal insight into differing cultural attitudes, the physical reality of living under two distinct Arab leaders and how national/social/religious ideologies filter through the consciousness of a wide-eyed adolescent. It’s a heartfelt, refreshing take on growing up in unique circumstances. I highly recommend reading it before the next volume of this trilogy is published in the UK in September by Two Roads.

Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes

It begins like a caper story. A young man named Carlos went missing from a family dinner when he stepped out to use the bathroom and never returned. An investigator is given the case to track him down. But his search almost immediately folds in upon itself when he starts searching the restaurant/Carlos’ office and interviewing people connected to him. The woman he speaks to who he believes is Carlos’ mother is not really his mother and many people at his office are only actors hired to look like productive employees. A scientist named Isabella analyzes traces of Carlos’ biological makeup and expounds upon an increasingly improbably multitude of chemical factors which could have led to him departing. The borders of reality collapse as the investigator struggles to analyse, research and report. Nothing is what it seems. The closer you look at things the more the world becomes an absurdist fantasy. Martin MacInnes’ compelling debut novel is a story of existential crisis and irreconcilable loss.

There’s a wonderful fluidity to MacInnes’ writing so that, although his narrative makes surprising tonal shifts from the comic to the horrific to exhaustively detailed analysis, I felt entranced by his skewed perspective of the world. It all resonates with how the investigator is not just searching for a missing person but for a way to wholly capture experience. By the time all the details are accounted for, time has moved on and the moment has passed and we must mull over it all again trying to faithfully recreate/understand it. If you think of these things as obsessively as the investigator then “it was a marvel, he thought, that any of them managed to do it all, to get from one day to another, to keep everything going just like that.” The novel artfully expresses the fallibility of memory and the clunky mechanics of consciousness. It’s interesting reading this so soon after César Aira (a quote on the cover compares this novel to his work) because Aira equally uses dream-like logic as a way of highlighting the futility of accurately representing reality.

The investigator frequently looks for a more primal understandings of human motivation and behaviour as a way of explaining our actions. Many chapters of this novel are prefaced with quotes from a fictional book about tribal behaviour. The second half of “Infinite Ground” entails the investigator’s travel to “the interior” of a forest where he believes Carlos has slipped away to. Here he embarks on tours to find others who have become lost in this wilderness as well as searching for more authentic modes of life. Hilariously reality here turns out to be as simulated as that in urban life. This is also where the investigator becomes more psychologically revealing as his civility is stripped slowly away. Some time ago he lost his wife and instead of dealing with her loss he seems inspired by Isabella’s proposition that “If it were up to me I would spend my whole life digging up the lost civilization of a single vanished person. There would be no end to the project, Inspector. No end to what may be discovered.” Instead of narrowing down possibilities, the investigator opens his mind to an infinite amount of them. It becomes apparent that “He was out of his depth in a case he couldn’t understand and would never resolve.” This was never about finding out what really happened to Carlos, but accounting for the totality of life when we’re caught in the unstoppable flow of time.

This is an experimental novel whose imagery and ideas challenge our modern sensibilities. In an age when our understanding of other people’s lives are mediated through how they are represented on social media it seems more pertinent than ever to question how we can really understand or know about another’s experience. At the same time there is something pleasingly retro about the novel’s style and earnest manner (perhaps because its action isn’t located in any specific time or place). It harkens back to post-modern literature like Joyce Carol Oates’ phenomenal novel “Mysteries of Winterthurn” which is more about the process of investigation than the crime itself. No matter how objective we try to be in understanding the world it is always refracted through a personal perspective leading the investigator of MacInnes’ novel to see he was “so naïve as to believe in the authenticity of the investigation and the autonomy of his own role.” The totality of the investigator’s being is caught up in searching for answers (which might be why he has no name), but he can only start to see what’s true when he looks hard at himself.

Interviewing Zadie Smith

These photos make it look like I was hilarious although I don't remember cracking that many jokes.

The publishers Hamish Hamilton who publish so many authors I love such as Ali Smith, Adam Haslett and Deborah Levy kindly invited me to interview Zadie Smith on Thursday evening at a special preview event for her forthcoming novel “Swing Time”. How could I say no?! Smith’s meteoric rise to literary fame occurred in the same year I first moved to London in 2000. Ever since reading the wonder that is “White Teeth” I’ve avidly followed her writing – not only her novels but her eloquent journalism such as her review of Christian Marclay’s artwork ‘The Clock’ (one of the most brilliant pieces of art from the last decade) and her recent powerful essay about our post-Brexit world ‘Fences.’ She’s an admirably thoughtful writer who portrays a wide variety of characters with depth and insight.

I read “Swing Time” last week and it is such an engaging and fascinating book. I’ll post a full review about it in November when it’s published. But just to give you an idea of what this new novel is about here’s a brief summary. The narrator recounts her adolescence growing up in North London in the 1980s with a fiercely intelligent feminist mother and a friendship she forms with a provocative and high-spirited girl named Tracey. They bond over a shared love of dancing and are “magnetically” drawn together because they are both mixed race and have matching skin colours. She recounts her development into the 90s and then the narrative takes an interesting turn where it zigzags through time showing scenes from the narrator’s adult life working as an assistant for a famous pop star who wants to establish a school for girls in West Africa and also shows how the narrator’s friendship with Tracey broke apart in their teenage years. “Swing Time” is also the title of a 1930s musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and a scene from this film features in the prologue. The narrator becomes somewhat entranced with watching scenes from old Hollywood musicals particularly in the offensive way they depict race. The novel gives a fascinating perspective on time, racial identity and growing economic/social/political divisions over a few decades.

The event was held in the Prince Albert pub in Camden – a locale in the neighbourhood of the novel’s narrator. Zadie read from the opening chapter and then we talked about how this novel is quite a different book for her in its structure and focus on only one character’s perspective. We also discussed the vulnerability of writing in the first person, the fractured sense of identity created by the diaspora, the draw of nostalgia and her lifelong love of musicals. She was so engaging and interesting in her answers I wish I could have spoken to her for ages. It was also a strange coincidence that Mark Lawson sat right behind me and Zadie because the room was so packed chairs for the audience were placed behind us as well. When I first came to the UK I loved watching Newsnight Review on the BBC because (coming from the US) it felt so amazing to me that there was a serious show devoted to reviewing the arts and culture. Lawson was the show’s long time host and I’ve always respected his opinions.

This is the first time I’ve interviewed an author so it was slightly nerve-wracking that it would be with someone of Zadie’s stature. But our talk went down well with the audience who all seemed engaged and excited about the novel. It was also wonderful speaking to Zadie one on one about what else we’ve been reading recently and life in the US vs the UK. She’s very friendly and sweet so even though I felt anxious about the interview she put me at ease. It felt like a nice cosy event even though there were around 100 people there with lots of drinks and bookish chat after our talk. It was such a pleasure doing this event. I hope you’re now looking forward to reading “Swing Time” when it comes out in November because it’s such an excellent novel.

Are you a Zadie fan and which of her novels do you like most?