Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi

How would a city respond if it were being trolled online? That's what Oyeyemi presents at the beginning of this curious, inventive and mischievous novel. Prague cannot be contained in a weekend but by following the experiences of three old friends who venture there for an uncommon hen party we see how their lives intersect and meld with the city's past. It's a riotous adventure travelling with them through the winding streets. Like anyone who attempts to take an idealistic stroll through a place which is new to them, things rarely go to plan. There are some especially funny scenes involving petty conflicts and bickering with the people they encounter.

The chequered pasts of these characters catch up with them while the metropolis' history and living present impresses itself upon them. Their colourful biographies reveal many surprises involving criminality, artistic differences and alternative names. It made me think about how we like to imagine that our identities are robust and fixed things that can slotted into an online profile. But really we're susceptible to changes as the world around us – especially a bustling city with a lively persona - demands attention.

The story about a bookstore which doesn't accept currency but works through an exchange of titles was extremely appealing. I was intrigued by the shapeshifting book Paradoxical Undressing which accompanies them. It shows how every story cannot be contained just like every personality cannot be classified. The way in which Hero engages with its text reminded me how any book which I take on a journey becomes a part of my travels as I dip into reading it at various points while experiencing new landscapes, meeting fresh people and learning about local tales. “Parasol Against the Axe” feels baffling at times but I was dazzled by the originality of its style and charismatic oddity. Oyeyemi's writing can be likened to Ali Smith and readers who require a strong plot should be cautious, but if you're in the mood for getting lost in a tangle of idiosyncratic stories her books are a joy to discover.

Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg (translated by Misha Hoekstra)

I really enjoy it when novels deviate from using traditional narrative structures to tell emotionally impactful stories in a way which is utterly unique. Danish author Tine Høeg's intriguing “Memorial, 29 June” is a tale told from the point of view of Asta, a young author working on a novel and a book about semi-obscure Polish sculptor Lysander Milo. Her account is related in fragments which feel somewhere between poetry and a non-linear first person account with occasional text message exchanges. Dialogue, observations, thoughts and written communication blend together. This may sound disorientating and it requires a heightened level of attention to keep track of who is speaking and how to situate this information. However, it quickly builds to a meaningful sense of Asta's personality and a more fluid sense of time. In this way it conveys a highly distinct new view of the complexity of youthful bonds, friendships, romance and rivalry.

The novel begins when Asta is invited to a memorial service commemorating the tenth anniversary of her friend August's death. This disrupts her literary work and her longstanding friendship with Mai who is a single mother. It also leads to a blending of the past and present as the text moves between her current circumstances and the heady days of her university life with a tight-knit social group. There's a mystery surrounding August's demise but also the nature of Asta's relationship with him. Intimate scenes between them are related in pieces giving clues concerning what happened to him and the love triangle involving August, Asta and Mai. I enjoyed how this presents a different way of understanding the ambiguity between people when their connection to each other can't necessarily be defined or classified. Small exchanges between them feel all the more poignant when surrounded by so much empty space on the page.

There's also a wonderful use of symbolism in certain details. The sculptor Milo worked clandestinely during his lifetime to memorialise the working class people around him. In a similar way, Asta has preserved her memories of August to solidify their intensely private moments together and maintain his unique personality. Their friendship group had a number of themed parties which descend into debauchery but they also inspire a sense of the carnivalesque which tests the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Asta's friend keeps a perpetual calendar which doesn't specify any particular year. Her account in this novel also defies a sense of linear time as it morphs from past to present. Though Asta's first book was relatively successful and has led to her receiving a residency and invitations to give readings, she humorously observes the shallowness with which some of the public interact with the literary world. It's one of the things which drives her to create new forms of narrative just as this book presents an enjoyable, surprising and meaningful new way to read a story.

Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner

Isabel Waidner has invented such a unique style of writing that's a mixture of social commentary, wildly creative imagery and buddy humour. I feel like Waidner is a modern-day Joe Orton. “Sterling Karat Gold” is a play on Kafka's “The Trial” in which an innocent character named Sterling is arrested after unwittingly being drawn into a bull fight in London's Camden Town. Sterling faces prosecution by a corrupt judge, enlists the help of friends, grapples with their lost father, stages a radical theatre production and uses space ships to cross time barriers. If this sounds too fanciful let me assure you that these stretches of the imagination always feel rooted in real-world issues and reflect the feeling of being marginalized within oppressive systems. As a character named Chachki states at one point: “correcting falsified narratives is important; but conjuring counter-realities even more so.” The bizarre quest which Sterling embarks on has the effect of liberating these characters and the reader from the restrictions and limitations we are forced to live under by plotting out new possibilities. It's also fantastic fun to read and gives a warm sense of camaraderie. 

The novel begins with Sterling stating that they lost their father to AIDS. It's gradually revealed that in his football career he had an affair with Justin Fashanu who was and still remains the only major English footballer to come out as gay. He later committed suicide. In the narrative, Fashanu becomes a kind of imaginary step father to Sterling. As in Waidner's earlier novel “We Are Made of Diamond Stuff” the referencing of real-life historical figures serves as a cultural reference point for individuals who broke through the static of the mainstream narrative to make their voices heard, but were ultimately strangled by society's restrictive perceptions about their identity. In addition to considering this history, Waidner's novel is also a powerful contemplation of the absurdity of the world today reflecting the feeling that “we were non-consensual participants in a reality put together by politicians, despots, more or less openly authoritarian leaders.” This leads to dangerous disillusionment and resignation because of the sense that “we're alive in a substandard fiction that doesn't add up.” Through this visionary new fiction Waidner shows how we don't need to settle and conform to the reality we've been offered but can boldly make our presence known and reform the mainstream narrative.

Little Scratch by Rebecca Watson

Authors have used innumerable methods and styles of writing to describe the physical and mental experience of everyday life in fiction, but Rebecca Watson has developed a technique which feels wholly unique. “Little Scratch” is the story of a day in the life of an unnamed young woman in London from the moment she wakes up to the moment she goes to sleep. The text is spaced across the page in a way which captures the repetition of the character's actions or how she might be thinking one thing while doing something else or how she might be surprised by a physical sensation like hot water. In this way we get a feel for the overlapping/simultaneous thoughts and sensory experiences she has throughout the day which at first appears to be an ordinary day like any other, but gradually it's revealed that she's really struggling to deal with a traumatic event. Encountering text which deviates so radically from the uniform paragraphs we're accustomed to might feel gimmicky or alienating at first, but it soon felt totally natural to me as I got into the rhythm of writing. It's also highly relatable because it captures something true about how we judder throughout our days getting lost in distractions or small obsessions or the tedium of office life or how we avoid thinking directly about things which seem insurmountably difficult. Watson creatively shows this to be both comic and tragic. 

Reading this book I became newly attuned to the way consciousness works. Within the process of thought we can get caught up in trivialities and possibilities which won't ever happen. I became aware how the imagination takes such a presence within our minds that we can playfully distort reality or build fictional narratives about the world around us to suit our desires. Watson demonstrates this in an early scene where the narrator observes someone with a small dog that looks like a bear and suddenly starts conjuring fantastical scenarios around it. She also shows how our laziness can become justified by thinking ourselves out of a situation. For instance, when she throws the remainder of an apricot away and misses the bin she goes on an elaborate train of thought about how it's the gesture to get it into the bin which really counts and how if she's questioned about the litter she'll refuse to accept any accountability. Obviously, it'd be much easier to just pick up the apricot and throw it away properly but it felt realistic how she avoids doing what's clearly sensible. The same proves to be true for larger issues in her life and this is conveyed in a poignant way. While the novel is mostly funny at first it slowly reveals the more serious issues she's avoiding and this is encapsulated at one point with the devastating line: “Is silence lying?”

The narrator is also a writer who frequently thinks about the book she wants to write or ways she can get into the literary scene rather than actually writing. Again, this feels highly relatable and though it can seem like a cliché to write a novel about the experience of wanting to be a writer, Watson addresses this in the text as well when reading a review about a book heavily based on an author's own life: “before having read the book, and despite liking autofiction! liking blurred memoir! still thinking, oh stop, stop with the talk about yourself, make something up, anything, anything, escape from yourself, just give me someone else's sincerity apart from your own, not your own!, trauma borrowed from yourself reads sore, feel it in me too much, no distance right now, need distance”. It seems almost contradictory that we often want authors to write what's true and important to them but also to use their imaginations to take us somewhere far from the author's own experience. It's interesting how she conveys this sense while also knowing that she doesn't want to confront the terrible thing that has shaken up her life.

Though I read this novel in its physical form I also listened to it as an audio book. When reading the physical book it's interesting to see all the gaps on the page and the way the text is creatively laid out, but it was also a unique experience hearing how this is conveyed in the audio book. Of course, pauses are used to dramatic effect but in some sections the overlapping text will be read simultaneously so you get a strong sense of how the narrator is thinking one thing while doing another. Sometimes books which use such a unique format feel like they are just being wilfully different, but this novel departs from a conventional narrative form in a way which is truly meaningful. It gets at the truth of experience to an almost uncomfortable degree. I found it highly relatable how she gets annoyed at someone on public transport because she can't read the title of the book they're reading, but I also got irritated with the narrator for being so consumed with such trivialities. However, I realise that what I'm really irritated with is myself because my mind is so often consumed with similarly petty or silly things. This novel has a disarming effect and I admire how it creatively presents experience in a way which feels truly novel.

Attrib and Other Stories by Eley Williams

The short stories in Eley Williams' debut collection may not have any concrete connection to each other, but many of them depict brief moments of emotional drama. However, instead of burrowing into the characters' feelings or reasons for these instances of lovers breaking up and other life changes, the stories are filled with seemingly trivial, distracted trails of thought that we follow through until the apparent crisis has passed. This technique might feel hollow if it weren't for the skilful way the author shows how our encounters with others (especially in highly dramatic moments) are often consumed with a fragmentation of different thoughts. It points to the gaps between language and meaning, emotion and its expression, experience and memory. While this left me wondering about many of the details behind these stories, I was nevertheless very moved by the sensation of these private moments of contemplation which are often punctuated with a playful curiosity and humour. 

There's an affectionally-portrayed introversion to these tales. We follow narrators who recite the lyrics to a song from the musical Oliver! or recount how starlings were brought to America by a man honouring Shakespeare. There's an accumulation of odd tidbits and facts which clutter an inward looking mind. This sensibility is enhanced by the way the narrators have more evident connections with animals or insects rather than humans. There's a hedgehog paddling in a swimming pool, a landmine seeking rat with great comic timing and a spider who constructs elaborate tricks. These are beings whose interior realities are ultimately unknowable and so they are in a way safe as confidants. But there are also beautiful moments of romantic tension where a narrator is mesmerised by the colour of a boy's eyes who he hides in a closet with or a narrator who panics over whether to kiss their same-sex partner in a gallery. 

Naturally, I felt the strongest bond with stories where there was a clear tension and something precious was at stake (even if I wasn't certain about the dramatic architecture surrounding this moment.) Several stories express an intense longing for a lover or friend without describing the particular circumstances. 'Concision' is a heartbreaking tale where an abruptly ended phone conversation results in the narrator staring contemplatively at the numerous black holes in the landline receiver. 'Spins' recounts a narrator's fumbling attempts to furtively dispose of a lover's silk pyjamas in a bin that's a sufficient distance from their home. 'Platform' describes a photo taken during a lover's departure at a train station and how the toupee of a man in the background flew off his head at that exact second. There are volumes of unspoken emotion invisibly built into the background of these tales.

Not every story is built around an untold crisis. There are tales that compellingly focus more on an obscure job like recording sounds to go with an art exhibit's audio guide or a chef who specialises in cooking birds in alcohol or a story about the construction and meaning of rosettes in politics. Some stories pushed too far into obscurity so I was left feeling puzzled rather than moved by the unknown details surrounding them. But, on the whole, the stories in this collection are so innovative and enjoyable. Their sense of humour and wordplay alongside an affection for second person narrators felt reminiscent of Ali Smith to me and that's always a good thing. There's something so unique about Williams' slant on the world that I'm very much looking forward to reading her novel.

Good Day? by Vesna Main

Vesna Main’s novel within a novel is mostly composed of a conversation between a husband and wife who discuss the wife’s novel-in-progress about a husband (Richard) and wife (Anna). Their daily chats often begin with the casual question “Good day?” – hence the title of this book. The wife’s novel is about how Anna discovers that Richard has been visiting prostitutes for years and the subsequent breakdown of their relationship. The writer and her husband discuss the moral complexity of this situation and its emotional impact on all the characters involved. And while listening to her describe details of the plot and characterizations, the husband grows increasingly frustrated at the liberties the wife takes in borrowing names and situations from their real life and putting them in her novel. The line between fact and fiction blurs so there’s an intriguing suspense where the reader wonders about the truth of this couple’s life. But it also raises questions about the dynamic interplay between the imagination and sex as a physical act. While this might all sound too meta-fictional and self-conscious, there’s a wonderfully comic tone to the situation as well as a poignancy in certain sections where there’s a clear disconnect or breakdown between them.

Relationships, fidelity and sex are infinitely complex subjects – that’s why there are so many novels about them! So I admire how this novel approaches these issues in a refreshing style which shows how they can be entangled with the fragility of our egos. In a way, the wife and husband’s dilemmas are entirely imagined (like the child in Edward Albee’s play ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and the drama that plays out from their conversation is in some ways for the sake of drama itself rather than any real betrayal. We form narratives in our heads about the multitude of relationships we have with people and these can become dangerously fixed in stone. Main’s story shows how these relationships can be tested out in our minds before being played out in reality or forgotten. But the novel also takes seriously the perspective of the prostitutes and one in particular named Tanya. The wife and husband’s conversations regarding plotlines about them show how our attitudes towards prostitution are wrapped up in judgements and how uncomfortable we are openly discussing sex in our society.

The novel also obviously plays a lot with issues to do with creative writing itself and the function which fiction serves. When do stories feel true to life and at what point do they become cliched? Do we need to sympathise with characters in order to have empathy for them? Should fiction be read as a veiled form of autobiography or a work entirely created in the imagination? These are all questions “Good Day?” raises and toys with in a compelling way. Like “We Are Made of Diamond Stuff” this is another novel I was compelled to read because of its listing for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize. It certainly takes an innovative approach in dealing with common plotlines about relationships and twisting them on their heads. And there’s a deliciously teasing way in which this novel ultimately asks if we’re writing our own stories or are our stories writing us?

We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner

I've been wanting to read Isabel Waidner for a while, but the recent Goldsmiths Prize shortlisting of their novel “We Are Made of Diamond Stuff” encouraged me to finally buy a copy. Because it's an award which honours books which “open up new possibilities of the novel form” I was prepared to read something experimental but I think this must be one of the most original novels I've read for some time. This novel is ‘Stranger Things’ fan fiction while also being an avant-garde form of social commentary. It’s at once fantastical and as real as grit caught in your teeth. These dualities might feel too testing for the reader if it weren’t for the wonderful sense of humour this novel possesses in satirising the dominant institutions and ideologies which inhibit its protagonists. In its playfulness it carves an opening in the world for its narrator and Shae who work for minimum wage in a hotel on the Isle of Wight. They ally themselves with or battle against the logos of corporate institutions which come to life as well as contending with the manager who withholds their wages, the locals who exclude them and the government which restricts their access to citizenship. Seeing the world through their point of view this story questions the meaning of belonging and nationality in a way which is poignant and personal. 

One of the things which struck me most was the layers within layers of exclusion that Waidner identifies. In their efforts to create a pride float these characters come to question the meaning of pride itself when Pride celebrations are commandeered by capitalist institutions or right-wing members of the queer community. Rather than uniting groups of people this ironically forms more divisions and it prompts the rhetorical question “How many times can you divide a minority culture?” They seek to connect these disparate groups in art and optimistically form a fashion label which will cross social boundaries. They also identify with and draw inspiration from contemporary non-mainstream writers and marginalized figures such as the poet Tommy Pico, Dennis Cooper and Tonya Harding. In forming this dialogue they seek to better identify the historical processes by which class divisions are upheld and interrogate the meaning of nationality. As someone who has also taken the 'Life in the UK' test in order to become a citizen these are issues I've personally grappled with as well. I appreciated and enjoyed the inventive way Waidner created a story which theatrically plays out these ideas on a fabulous stage. 

I Am Sovereign by Nicola Barker

Lately it feels like Nicola Barker hasn’t been able to finish writing a novel without wanting to blow it up. Her last novel “H(A)PPY” was set in a future society where everyone’s mind was plugged into a single continuous stream and its hero’s consciousness became more hallucinatory while the text itself morphed into multi-coloured fragments and bizarre structures. It seems like there’s more tension in her narratives lately where the fourth wall is breaking down. Her new book “I Am Sovereign” is a self-designated novella. Within the story it’s stated “This is just a novella (approx.. 23,000 words)”. And its story is quite simple on the surface. The 49 year-old protagonist Charles creates customized stuffed bears and is seeking to sell his house in Wales. Over a twenty minute period estate agent Avigail presents the house to prospective buyer Wang Shu accompanied by her daughter Ying Yue who has come along as her translator. But the concept of this tale is merely a box within which Barker illuminates the artificiality of her characters and uses them as ciphers to discuss concepts of narrative itself. What little story there is soon breaks down – Barker even states at one point “Nothing of much note happens, really, does it?” Instead, Barker engages in arguments with particular characters and muses upon the nature of language, storytelling and authority. There’s a frenetic energy to Barker’s writing which is irresistible if you’re in a good humour or frustrating if you’re after an old-fashioned plot.

The thing about reading such a self-conscious and angst-ridden story is that it ought to be eye-rolling, but Barker has such clear affection for her characters that it feels like she really wants to grant them complete independence while also controlling them. “The Author can’t bear the idea of those four people leaving Charles’s tiny work room. They feel so alive to her.” Traits and details are assigned to characters but just as quickly they’re questioned because the characters believe differently. This complication comes most into play with the introduction of a character named Gyasi “Chance” Ebo who feels it’s an injustice that Barker has dragged him into her narrative. The character and author bicker and eventually his role in the story is replaced by that of another character. Barker toys with the limits of independence that characters can have to break free from an author’s designated plan and write their own story. This has obvious parallels to how we exist in society – especially in contemporary British society which is plagued with the question and democratically decided edict of Brexit. Are we creating the boundaries within which we want to exist or are those boundaries being written around us?

The characters are particularly inured to modern-day gurus found on YouTube who dole out advice. One such proponent advocates the goal “To be Sovereign. To be present, positive and boundaried.” There’s a resistance in Barker’s characters to be the screens she is projecting upon, but they are also aware there is no independence without their dependence upon her. It’s like the spiritual paradox of free will versus predestination. The comparison is very apt because Barker’s fiction is quite often consumed with questions of faith and spirituality. The characters in this novella are superstitious and seek revelation. However, the religious concerns expressed aren’t about indoctrination so much as they’re about searching and epistemological questions. Barker seems to take all this very seriously while also recognizing it’s absurd and her concerns are ultimately unanswerable. In her playfulness Barker is able to have it both ways in this novella. She states “shouldn’t fiction strive to echo life (where everything is constantly being challenged and contested)? Or is fiction merely a soothing balm, a soft breeze, a quiet confirmation, a temporary release? Why should it be either/or? Can’t fiction be exquisitely paradoxical?” I enjoyed the way this novella so joyously presents authorial problems and questions rather than a story with an affirmative arc. It’s like a teddy bear whose stuffing is oozing out, but you love it nevertheless.

Lanny by Max Porter

It’s difficult to describe the experience of reading Max Porter’s new novel “Lanny”, but it feels somewhere between “Reservoir 13” by Jon McGregor and an Ali Smith novel. In some ways it’s a simple story of family life in a small English village where a child goes missing. But it’s also about ancient elemental forces which periodically cause widespread chaos and test all the moral fibres which we believe hold our society together. Parents Robert and Jolie want their young son Lanny to develop his inherent artistic sensibility so bring him under the friendly tutelage of an aging famous local artist named Pete. The two develop a touching creative bond. But Lanny harbours many eccentricities and beliefs which centre around a figure of local legend named Dead Papa Toothwort. It’s a mystery whether this character from village lore actually exists in the story or is a figment of the eccentric boy’s imagination, but his presence is felt throughout the book as Toothwort takes in the sounds and voices of the village which physically twist throughout the pages of this novel. It’s a rapturous journey which slides from the emotional details of ordinary life to the deliciously surreal. 

That any new book by Porter is unclassifiable comes as no surprise given the highly innovative form of his debut “Grief is the Thing with Feathers”. Both his novels show the way guilt and inner pain distort reality and this is reflected in the way sentences and paragraphs are structured on the page. So reading Porter's books feels more like an experience as if staring at a sculpture where the form conveys as much meaning as the content. He has a talent for illuminating the inner workings and relationships of a family – especially the repercussions when there is an unexpected tragedy. But “Lanny” captures more the feeling of a whole community and how such an event can trigger the release of fear and prejudice to turn a village against itself. While it brings some people together, it also causes others to question who belongs: “Authenticity competitions, striving to be the one that most belongs here, guarding their own special spot in the picture. All this has shown what a bunch of wankers most people are.” In this way, this new novel engages more with the political mood of the country which has been especially preoccupied with questions about who is “authentically” English. At the same time it is a playful, funny and wickedly irreverent story making it such a joy to read. And, at its heart, there is a hopeful portrait of a sensitive boy who has the capacity to reshape the future.

People in the Room by Norah Lange (translated by Charlotte Whittle)

This is the first novel by Norah Lange to be translated into English and it’s just been published by the wonderful independent press And Other Stories. It was written in Spanish and originally published in Argentina in 1950. In her day Lange was a celebrated member of the Argentine literary scene – especially the avant-garde Buenos Aires group of the 20s and 30s. Throughout her life she famously hosted many literary salons and associated with writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca. She was awarded a Grand Prize of Honor by the Argentine Society of Writers having published poetry, memoirs, nonfiction and novels. Yet, she’s barely known outside her native country for reasons which César Aira’s introduction to the book and James Reith’s recent article in the Guardian interestingly suggest. It’s thrilling to discover a novel like “People in the Room” because, although I studied avant-garde literature at university from Borges to Alain Robbe-Grillet to Tristan Tzara, there were few female writers of this era included on the course list outside of Gertrude Stein and Nathalie Sarraute. It’s somewhat alarming to think that Norah Lange was there all the time, but most North American and European readers had no access to her work.

As characteristic of the innovative art and writing from this time, “People in the Room” pushes the boundaries of character and narrative where we’re given few specific details about the protagonist and her situation. Instead the reader follows her labyrinthine train of thought as she voyeuristically observes three women in their thirties through a window across the street from where she lives. Her obsession with these neighbours leads to endless speculations about their potential status as criminals or tragic figures or secretive heroines. Curiously, though she makes tentative contact with the women, she doesn’t want to discover any actual facts about them – not even their names. It’s as if her observations can transform them into an endlessly tantalizing array of fictional characters of her own creation: “I knew, if I was patient, I could have their finished portraits just the way I liked finished portraits to be: for them to be missing something only I knew how to add”.

Maybe it was the frequent references to portraits and three women that made me fleetingly think of the portrait of the Brontë sisters as I was reading the novel. But it was thrilling to discover when I read in Aira’s introduction (which I only did after I finished reading the novel so as to avoid any spoilers or interpretation of the text before I’d experienced it myself) that Lange had publicly stated she was partly inspired by Branwell’s famous portrait of his sisters where a ghostly painted out figure looms in the background. There’s a popular romantic conception of the Brontës living a cloistered existence of literary creativity that seems to chime with this story. But “People in the Room” also doesn’t shy from exploring darkly troubling concepts as well. Throughout the book Lange refers to portraits as if to fix a version of the women in place before excitedly creating another portrait which shows them in a different light. But this leads to an unwieldy multiplicity: “She seemed to possess many portraits, as if constantly adding them to the hidden gallery of her own face; as if arranging, on the four walls of the drawing room, in order, the story of her face.” It’s fascinating how these descriptions naturally inspire ideas about our psychology and William James’ concept of how we have a different personality for each person we know. It suggests that no matter how dedicated we are in observing or spending time with one another we can never really know one another completely.

Branwell's portrait of the Bronte sisters

Alongside these fascinating ideas, there’s a compelling ambiguity throughout the text about the narrator herself. She’s a teenager on the brink of some great change who is directed by her family at one point to take a trip elsewhere. Yet, rather than meditate on her own state of being or future, she continues her frenzied focus on the women across the way who might be entirely in her imagination or mannequins or women involved in their own unknowable preoccupations. It’s as if she wants to preserve something about her creative process and imagination before yielding to the responsibilities and limitations of adult life. There’s a sombre tone to this enterprise “it would always be as if she was gathering memories beside a plot reserved for a grave.” There are frequent macabre references throughout the novel to death or the narrator’s expectation/desire/fear that the women she observes might soon die. Perhaps if they are dead she can better preserve her own idea of them without the messy complication of their real personalities. There’s a disturbingly bleak sort of romance to this which she describes stating “when I was fond of people I always imagined them dead.”

Getting brief clues about the narrator herself at different points in the text makes “People in the Room” a mystery wrapped in a mystery. I enjoyed the many layered and oblique ideas this book holds. It’s a novel which ought to be read alongside Norah Lange’s contemporaries for the fascinating concepts it explores and the way the curious story pushes the meaning of narrative. But it’s also a compelling exploration of the process of writing itself. The women are the narrator’s malleable characters which she endlessly enjoys reshaping, imbuing with her own psychology and destroying in a perverse godly act when she can no longer control them. It’s a novel that can be read in many different ways and would no doubt benefit from multiple rereadings. 

Crudo by Olivia Laing

Recently I made a video talking about examples of contemporary authors who fictionally reimagine the lives of classic authors. But it's been a funny coincidence that the past two novels I've read do this exact thing in creatively pioneering ways. Cristina Rivera Garza brought back multiple versions of the Mexican writer Amparo Davila in her gender-bending “The Iliac Crest” and now Olivia Laing has done so in her first novel “Crudo” by merging her own identity with that of punk poet and cutting-edge novelist Kathy Acker (who died in 1997.) I've been anticipating this novel so much because Laing's nonfiction book “The Lonely City” was such an important touchstone for me in understanding the condition of loneliness. “Crudo” follows a re-imagined Kathy twenty years after her death in 2017 during the languorous Italian days in the lead up to her marriage to a much older writer. She reflects on the state of the world from dispiriting politics to her interactions with groups of artists to the challenging interplay between the inner and outer world. In doing so Laing forms a fascinating portrait of the modern crisis of an individual who feels she has opportunities and access to vast amounts of information, but is in some ways powerless to enact change or escape her own privilege. 

Part of what makes Laing's nonfiction so mesmerising is the intense connection she describes with the artists and subjects whose lives she explores so sympathetically. These are often figures who were marginalized but whose creations and activism pushed the conversation forward. So it's unsurprising that she'd be drawn to the figure of Kathy Acker whose anti-establishment aesthetic incorporated styles of pastiche and a cut-up technique to explore elements from her own life as well as subjects such as power, sex and violence. Acker's fiction also appropriated a number of prominent classic authors such as Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Bronte, Marquis de Sade, Charles Dickens and Georges Bataille. It's described in this novel how “She wrote fiction, sure, but she populated it with the already extant, the pre-packaged and readymade. She was in many ways Warhol’s daughter, niece at least, a grave-robber, a bandit, happy to snatch what she needed but was also morally invested in the cause: that there was no need to invent”. In the same way, Laing transposes lines from Acker's writing (as well as some other authors) to form a modern narrative which is in some ways autobiographical. This literally bleeds Acker's thoughts and ideas into Laing's sensibility to reiterate what has been said before and say something new. 

I'm really fascinated by writing techniques which incorporate pre-existing texts such as Jeremy Gavron's recent “Felix Culpa” which forms a compelling self-contained fictional narrative. But “Crudo” is much more intensely personal describing its protagonist Kathy's desire to break out of the bounds her gender and her time period: the bleak summer of 2017 when the public dialogue was overwhelmed with talk of Brexit and Trump (as it still is.) It describes how she both wants to engage in this conversation and escape from it in the transformative space of solitude “It was just she kept sneezing, it was just that she needed seven hours weeks months years a day totally alone, trawling the bottom of the ocean, it’s why she spent so much time on the Internet” and how our online lives filtered through mediums such as Twitter allow us immediate access to information, but also have a curious distancing effect. This leads to a understandably pessimistic view of the world with its diminishing resources and reactionary politics:“It was all done, it was over, there wasn’t any hope.” But, of course, Kathy as an individual persists as does the propensity to create art that engages with and reacts to this fraught world. 

Part of me felt uncertain at first if Laing's method of invoking the figure of Kathy Acker was necessary for her to fictionally express a state of being that is evidently so painfully real for the author herself. After spending a lot of time thinking about what this novel says, I'm convinced that Laing's method isn't just a formal experiment but a necessary act. For all its desperate searching and relatable despair, “Crudo” is a surprisingly romantic novel in the way Laing breathes new life into a pioneering writer from the past and pays tribute to the power of committed love for comfort and solace. One of the most powerful scenes comes when Kathy is at a dinner party where it describes her grappling to eat a crab. She pounds on it persistently to crack inside and there's a moment where her personality melds with that of the crustacean: “Someone was pounding on the door. The hammer, smashing the crab’s back. She wanted to be cracked open, that was the thing, only on her own terms and within preordained limits. There were rules, she changed them.” This beautifully encapsulates the core of this narrative which feels encroaching forces threatening our liberty and our bodies, but which shows a determination to change the landscape which is so rapidly transforming beneath our feet. “Crudo” is both a beautiful drag act and an urgent cry to witness, remember, connect and move forward.

Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron

Part of me was so drawn to reading “Felix Culpa” simply for the sheer audacity of its creation and out of a curiosity to see how it would work. This is a novel that’s composed almost entirely from the lines of other works of fiction by (approximately) eighty authors as varied as Italo Calvino, Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and Mary Shelley. In poetry this is known as a cento where different verses or passages from multiple authors are composed into a new order. Jeremy Gavron forms in this fictional collage experiment a story about a young man named Felix who mysteriously died after he was arrested in a botched robbery. The narrator is a writer/teacher at the prison where Felix was incarcerated and he embarks on a mission to discover more about Felix’s life and what happened to him. Amidst his travels to interview people Felix encountered he slides into his own epistemological crisis and radically alters his life. It’s a moving tale in itself, but through the very nature of its innovative construction it also poses fascinating questions about the meaning of narrative and the way in which readers connect with fiction.

I think one of the greatest works of art produced thus far in the 21st century is Christian Marclay’s video art installation ‘The Clock’. This is a looped 24-hour video montage that takes scenes from hundreds of films and television shows featuring clocks that are synchronized to show in real time. In doing so, these pieces of disparate video footage link up in a mesmerising way and meaningfully comment upon the way we are all caught in the flow of time. It’s interesting how when we’re confronted with a series of fictional works that are artfully mixed together we begin to imaginatively form narratives in our heads. As I was reading “Felix Culpa” I became aware that I was filling out scenes or adding details to characters based only on a few suggestive phrases that Gavron has paired. Of course, this is what we do all the time when reading fiction. But, somehow, because I was aware that this narrative was a construct of preformed sentences, I had a greater self-consciousness about the active role I play as a co-creator of the fiction that I’m reading.

Some sources used for the text of Felix Culpa

In the course of reading this novel I also became more aware of the playful ambiguity of language and the plasticity of sentence construction. Lines or phrases that mean something in one context can come to mean something entirely different in another. Again, this is something fiction does all the time and part of its great beauty is how it can mean many things all at once. In this novel lines are spaced out with gaps in between them to demarcate how they’ve been taken from different sources. This also has the effect of highlighting passages and the reader must take an infinitesimally small pause in going from one line to another. This is something that’s often done in poetry, but in this book lines consciously flow together to form a cohesive narrative. So a line like “Time comes to leave” stands on its own. This has a meaning within the story where it’s time for a character to depart to go somewhere else. However, staring at this line on its own it also takes on connotations of how time is fleeting, that a moment only arrives to depart. But, in reading these lines on their own, I also often felt curious about how this line might have been used in its original story.

What’s impressive about “Felix Culpa” is that this elaborate self-conscious assembly of hypertext doesn’t detract from the pleasure of the story Gavron forms himself. I felt totally emotionally drawn into this tale and sympathised with Felix’s struggles in life as the narrator uncovers piece after piece about the journey that led to Felix’s untimely death. This character is formed more through an outline than through direct descriptions of Felix himself, yet the reader is still keyed into the ambiguities of Felix’s heart and mind. I grew to feel a sense of loneliness in Felix where his circumstances led him to make poor choices and end up in isolation. I haven’t felt this way about a character since reading about the nearly silent figure of Stevie at the centre of Rachel Seiffert’s brilliant novel “The Walk Home”. Felix’s struggle is something that the narrator of the novel also connects with and his obsession with Felix’s plight says something significant about the unspoken crisis in the narrator’s own life. This novel is a richly rewarding work of art.

The Goldsmiths Prize 2017 Shortlist

If you want to tap into the most cutting edge fiction today, the Goldsmiths Prize (now in its fifth year) is one to watch. It was started in 2013 by Goldsmiths, a university in south London and the prize seeks to celebrate creative daring, reward fiction that breaks the mould and extends the possibilities of the novel form. Obviously, like any prize, it’s subjective. This isn’t a definitive list of all the excitingly experimental things being published today, but it gives a good guideline and it’s become one of my favourite prizes since past winners Eimear McBride’s “A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing”, Ali Smith’s “How to be Both”, Kevin Barry’s “Beatlebone” and Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones” count among some of my favourite novels in recent years. And isn’t it funny that the previous two winners are both Irishmen who have the word “bone” in their book titles? Those Irish are so morbid! Ha!

I’ve read four of this year’s six shortlisted novels. I really admired both Sara Baume’s “A Line Made by Walking” and Nicola Barker’s “H(A)PPY”. I had very mixed feelings reading Jon McGregor’s “Reservoir 13” but in reflection I’ve found it a really moving novel and I’d be eager to read it again. I’m as baffled about what’s so good about Gwendoline Riley’s “First Love” now as I was when it was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year. It made me angry how withholding the narrative of this novel felt, but obviously others appreciate it much more. I’ve heard mixed things about Will Self’s novel “Phone” but I’ve appreciated his fiction in the past and I’m eager to read it. I hadn’t heard of “Playing Possum” by Kevin Davey before this prize and I love it when book prizes introduce me to writers’ work I wouldn’t have come across otherwise.

You can also watch me discuss my thoughts about the shortlist and experimental fiction here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKbujRtyLWg

What do you think of the list? Do you like experimental fiction? Are you intrigued to read any of the books from the shortlist? It’s difficult to say, but I’m betting that “Reservoir 13” or “A Line Made by Walking” will win. Do you have a prediction?

The Little Buddhist Monk by César Aira (Translated by Nick Caistor)

There's something really compelling and endearing about the prolific maverick Argentinian writer César Aira. He takes an idea and runs with it pulling the reader through madcap, existential or surreal adventures. Previously, I've only read his novel “The Seamstress and the Wind” but I can tell likes to take his characters on trips: both physical journeys and through altered psychological states that warp reality. “The Little Buddhist Monk” (first published in 2005 under the title “El Pequeño Monje Budista”) is about a diminutive monk who feels his life was meant for something much larger than the circumscribed existence in his native Korea. French couple Napoleon and Jacqueline arrive in the country seeking artistic inspiration and cultural edification. The small man has difficulty being seen, but once they notice him he offers to take them to an out of the way monastery. What at first appears like a realistic cross-cultural experience gradually morphs into something much more strange and abstract. In this way, Aira challenges and surprises while making uncommon connections.

The reader first becomes attuned to something off-kilter about Aira’s landscape when the monk and French couple travel to the monastery. Individuals periodically pull the emergency brake on the train and exit onto stations which look slightly off to Napoleon and Jacqueline. The monk confides to them that these people have been enchanted by witches that inhabit the surrounding environment and find it fun to prank travellers into stopping at stations which don’t really exist. This concept of people being controlled by unknown forces repeats in later revelations about the monk’s state of being. It prompts questions about the degree of liberty people are capable of possessing. We often dream of living beyond the bounds of the lives we’re born into, but few people are actually able to break out of the paths created through our particular circumstances and culture. It also asks the degree of difference between one place and another in the modern world: “globalisation, which nowadays had converted all civilisations into one.” The French couple travel to experience some “authentic” kind of other, yet find themselves in a reality that has merely been formatted for their consumption.

Another dominant concept of the novel is about the question of perspective. Napoleon is a photographer who takes 360 degree photos as a way of trying to capture the totality of a particular time and place. The mischievous monks at the monastery dart in and out of the picture frame because they find it funny, but their image isn’t captured due to the long exposure. So does Napoleon’s photo fully capture the reality of this place? Aira questions the validity of realism in artwork stating “The less realist a work of art, the more the artist has been obliged to get his hands dirty in the mud of reality.” It could be that through his absurdist storytelling, the author more fully engages with our psychological reality rather than novels that render a landscape within nature’s laws. One of the final concepts this novel poses is a television program which the monk is desperate to watch as it claims to definitively map female genitalia. This is a humorous joke about some men’s inability to sexually satisfy women because they can’t locate the pleasure spot, but it also says something about our difficulty in really seeing each other even when we’re as intimate as possible and completely stripped down.

It’s challenging to get the reader to truly care about the journey of the characters in such cerebral writing. But I feel Aira shows real empathy for his characters’ situations and takes their struggles seriously even while driving them through the funhouse of his creation. There’s tension in the French couple’s relationship when Jacqueline sees no place for herself in Napoleon’s all-encompassing photographs. She finds that “In real life there were no enchanted princesses, only hopes extinguished by routine, by prosaic and gradual deaths.” Their many journeys abroad do little to bring the pair emotionally closer together. I was even more compelled by the monk’s dilemma who seeks to become larger than the small existence he’s been programmed to live.

Aira is such a curious writer, but I think his novels only manage to be so compelling because they are so brief. There are now over eighty of them! His style of leaping from idea to idea around a central story concept wouldn’t be sustained very well in a larger fictional work. For instance, I don’t think he could pull off a novel as long as Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsolled” or "The Buried Giant" which follow dream-like structures. Nevertheless, Aira’s absurdist imagery peppered with philosophical musing has such a seductive appeal. It’s invigorating writing that has a curious way of lingering in the reader’s imagination.

Ten Great Books of Experimental Fiction from 2016

Continuing with my lists of the year centred around certain categories, here are great books of experimental fiction first published in the UK in 2016. I’m really excited by daring writing that breaks the mould and I think these books have pushed the form of fiction in interesting ways. They include a memoir told with a mixture of literary forms, a bleak tale of isolation and paranoia, a disfigured man waking up to the horrors of a warped reality, a detective investigation which shades into the philosophical, a wild road trip in search of a lost sister, a brilliantly innovative account of a difficult love affair, a radical re-visioning of Icelandic history, intriguing thoughtful tales of female experience, prostitution and rabid dogs in Spain and a hilarious/thought provoking take on standardized tests. Watch me discuss my top ten picks of experimental fiction here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQHC2fCUi_k

Have you read any books that intriguingly play with narrative form this year? Is so, let me know about them in the comments.