Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest

First Impressions

“Having Spent Life Seeking” is an incredibly powerful and beautifully written novel. I felt like I genuinely lived alongside these characters and went on a journey with them, which is exactly the experience I want from fiction. This is a story about the difficulty of self-acceptance set against the pull of social acceptance, a tension I think so many of us feel, especially in childhood and our teenage years, rendered here with great impact. It's also a novel about the importance of persisting through seemingly insurmountable challenges, because there will still be beauty, joy, love, and even tranquility to be found in life, even when the world feels like it's completely falling apart.

Premise

The novel follows Rothko, who at the very start has just been released from prison after twenty years. Rothko is slowly rebuilding a life in their hometown of Edgecliff, a fictional, slightly shabby English seaside town of the kind with plenty of lifelong locals alongside weekend holidaymakers. Rothko is trying to live and work independently, but the world has changed enormously in their absence. One of the most impressive things about this novel is how little interiority or direct self-reflection we actually get from these characters; we mostly get description of experience and dialogue rather than explicit inner monologue. Normally that kind of withholding frustrates me in fiction, because I want access to what a character is really feeling. But even without much of that here, I felt like I deeply understood these characters and could connect with what they were going through, which I think is a real feat of craft: conveying all this emotion without spelling it out on the page. It reminded me a little of David Szalay's “Flesh”, where a similarly withheld interior life still lets you feel exactly what a character is going through, though the styles of these two books are quite different otherwise.

Rothko's Story

Rothko has a difficult relationship with their mother, Meg, who struggles with her own addiction and the trauma of past abuse. We get Rothko's backstory gradually, and for a long stretch we don't actually learn why they were in prison for so long, which serves a couple of purposes: real narrative tension, but also a way of resisting the instinct to judge someone based purely on incarceration, when what actually matters is understanding the circumstances that led there. So much of this novel is about connection and disconnection, especially with strangers, capturing both beautiful, unexpected moments of human recognition between people who owe each other nothing, and moments where people judge and mistreat one another on entirely superficial grounds. Rothko doesn't judge others this way, even though they are far from a straightforwardly virtuous character and has made real mistakes; when they meet someone destitute, angry, or unpredictable, they tend to meet them on a purely human level, and those moments landed with real emotional force for me.

Rothko's nickname comes from childhood: they blush deeply pink or red when embarrassed or ashamed, and as a child this was described as their face "going like a Rothko painting." It's such a strong, simple visual image that stayed with me throughout, a way of physically rendering shame without ever spelling out the internal experience behind it. There's a similarly striking scene, a memory of riding in a car with a driver who's become so emotionally unstable that it feels like the car could crash at any moment, that hit me hard, since I've had a similar experience myself of being trapped in a car with someone who seemed to have lost touch with reality, desperate just to get out even on a dangerous highway.

Family, Gender, and Identity

I also appreciated how Tempest handles Rothko's relationship with their sister. I found the line “they might have come from the same people but they had never really been coming from the same place” to be especially poignant. Though there’s a shared origin there is also a fundamental, if imperfect, mutual understanding. Part of that distance is on Rothko, for not fully opening up to their sister about who they are, something tied to their lifelong struggle with gender identity and discomfort inhabiting a body which, for much of their life, read to others as more conventionally masculine, generating real confusion, suspicion, and hostility from people around them. There's a beautiful early friendship with a teenage boy, and later a love affair with a girl named Dionne. This novel is, in part, a genuine love story, but one that follows two people developing as individuals alongside their relationship, rather than staying fixed while navigating differences between two already-formed selves, which felt like a genuinely different, truer way of depicting a long-term relationship than most fiction manages.

Throughout the book, Rothko frequently refers to other people as "normal" and expresses how they feel alienated from the general population. Much of the novel traces Rothko’s path toward a real sense of self-acceptance, toward feeling that everything about them is simply right rather than something to keep measuring against other people. There's a genuinely important, difficult scene where Rothko, just wanting a quiet pint after work, has to decide which gendered toilet to use, aware that either choice risks a reaction from other people in the pub, and the fear and humiliation bound up in a situation that should be entirely mundane. There's an echo of this too when a group of teenagers openly discuss and speculate about Rothko's gender, dialogue that felt so vivid I could practically hear it. Given everything happening around trans rights and legislation in Britain right now, I think really feeling what that experience is like from the inside matters.

Language and Structure

Tempest is also a poet and musician, and that shows in the writing: mostly grounded and realistic, but with moments of real philosophical density where a single line opens out to convey an entire lived experience. There's a striking stretch, covering a long period of Rothko's life during a low point with addiction, that shifts into an almost musical, rhyming register, compressing a huge amount of time and despair into very little space. For instance, one line that stuck with me was "Using is its own universe." The novel conveys, through both Rothko’s mother Meg and Rothko themself, just how consuming addiction becomes, and how it can override every other relationship and responsibility in a person's life.

A Small Reservation

If I have one criticism, it's that the compressed, musical section covering Rothko's addiction and much of their prison sentence skips over a lot: twenty years is an enormous span of time, and the actual lived experience of prison doesn't get fully rendered, even though it shaped so much of Rothko’s life. The novel doesn't shy away from stating that prison was a genuinely horrible experience, even while acknowledging some of what Rothko gained there, skills, one significant connection with another person, but the difficulty of reintegration afterward, in a world that's simply moved on without them (self-checkout lines being one small, disorienting example), is handled really well.

A Personal Resonance

This novel feels genuinely personal for Tempest, who has undergone his own journey with gender in recent years, now identifying as a trans man and using he/him pronouns. Rothko is referred to as they/them for most of the novel, until a single moment where he's able to say plainly, "I am a man," to another character, after which the pronouns shift to he/him. It's a tender, powerful moment, and one I felt I'd really traveled toward alongside him: something so simple for so many people to say, and so hard-won here.

I got my copy of this book from the queer library that the shop Aesop runs every Pride month in London, turning their usual fragrance shop into a stock of free queer books for anyone to take. Tempest has spoken in interviews about being given a copy of “Stone Butch Blues” by a stranger early in life, and how transformative that was, and I think that same spirit runs through this novel and through initiatives like Aesop's library. This year I also marched in a Pride parade myself for the first time, with the small Rīga Pride contingent in London, drawing on my own Latvian heritage, and witnessed one of my fellow marchers run to embrace his mother on the sidelines in tears, a moment that felt like it echoed exactly what this novel is reaching for: real joy and connection persisting alongside real struggle.

Verdict

It’d be negligent of me not to mention that there's also a wonderful thread to this story involving Rothko's dog, Donovan. So much of the book is about how fleeting, even coincidental connections with other people can matter enormously to our own journey of understanding and accepting ourselves. The novel also raises poignant larger questions about the sheer strangeness of being alive; for example, one line that struck me was "“How could a thing as weightless as life be so fucking heavy so much of the time?” Life passes through us lightly, in the moment, and yet we carry so much weight: memory, disappointment, love, heartbreak, and the world's judgment. What matters, the novel suggests, is how we feel about ourselves and how much we allow those feelings to affect the way we actually live in the world.

I thought this was an absolutely incredible book and I loved reading it. I'd highly recommend it, and I'd love to hear from anyone else who's read it, or who wants to point me toward more of Kae Tempest's work, since I've read some of his poetry but haven't yet properly explored the music.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

First Thoughts

“Departure(s)” is Julian Barnes's latest book and probably his last and I want to talk through my thoughts on it, because I didn't wholly love it. That said, I found it an extremely empathetic, moving, and wise meditation on life, love, memory, and writing — all subjects Barnes has returned to many times across his career. There's something almost ironic in calling it “Departure(s)”, since it isn't really a departure in subject matter at all. But these are huge, inexhaustible topics, and the way Barnes deepens his understanding of them here felt genuinely compelling to me.

Why "Departures"

The title works on a few levels. In the book, Barnes discusses being diagnosed with a form of blood cancer that isn't terminal, won't kill him outright, but is something he'll live with for the rest of his life, never fully defeating it until, as he wryly notes, he dies — at which point he supposes he'll have "won," except he'll be dead. It's also a departure from writing itself: he states plainly, on page nine, that this will be his last book.

The exact nature of this book is hard to pin down. I'd call it primarily a memoir, but it's also part essay and part novel, since at its center is the story of a couple, Jean and Stephen, and their particular, fascinating love story — one Barnes plays with our uncertainty over: is it true, or isn't it? He makes a wry joke about this hybrid form within the book itself, having Jean accuse the narrator (whom he names Julian) of writing these blended books when he should just pick fiction or nonfiction. Barnes's defence is that he knows exactly what he's doing, and it's true he's spent much of his career writing fiction wrapped in nonfiction, or the reverse, exploring memory, history, and the tension between subjective and objective truth.

Memory and Identity

The book opens with a fascinating psychological case: a condition called involuntary autobiographical memory, in which a specific sensory trigger, like the taste of cherries, floods someone with every memory of eating cherries across their entire life. Barnes wonders whether this might resolve the uncertainty of memory, letting us fully re-experience the past in detail, only to question whether that would actually be desirable at all, given how exhausting and how still fundamentally subjective it would remain. Other cases of vivid, detailed recall raise a similar problem: how could such memories ever really be verified?

This feeds into one of the book's central questions: what actually makes us who we are? Barnes opens by suggesting we are our memories, then complicates that immediately. If people lose their memories, as so many do with age, have they lost their essential self? Or is there something else, something to do with character, desire, and unfulfilled desire, that persists regardless?

Jean and Stephen

That question runs directly into the book's central love story. Barnes (as "Julian") met Jean and Stephen at Oxford in their early twenties and introduced them to each other; they fell into an intense relationship, then chose, as many couples do at that threshold moment after university, to end things and go their separate ways. Decades later, Barnes reconnected with both of them separately, discovered each had privately been thinking of the other all along, reintroduced them, and they married. It reads, at first, like a conventional happy ending, but that isn't where their story actually lands — old patterns resurface, and they've each lived entire, full lives apart from one another in the interim. Barnes gives the couple fictional names, explaining he'd once promised never to write about them, which only deepens the book's playful uncertainty about what's true and what's invented; he even challenges readers at points to go verify details themselves. But I don't think the factual status of Jean and Stephen is really the point. What matters is the shape of a love affair with a decades-long gap in the middle, echoing something Barnes notes people often experience late in life: vivid childhood memories resurfacing while the middle years blur and fade. A life with a hole in the center of it, made of what can't fully be known or recovered, and yet somehow still the substance of the whole thing.

A Writer Taking Stock

Barnes leans on other writers throughout, Proust especially, but also Flaubert and Woolf, quoting them frequently and acknowledging, with real self-deprecating humor, his own worry about repeating himself after so many books — he mentions fact-checking with scholars of his own work to make sure he isn't retelling the same anecdote again. There's a warm humor throughout in how he pokes fun at his own preoccupations, even while clearly still unable to move past them, because they're the questions that don't resolve.

It is a fairly brief book, and the love story at its center is handled somewhat lightly — I found myself wanting more detail there — but I think its brevity serves the larger meditation on time, personality, and understanding amid the general messiness of living. There's a genuinely somber undertone here too: an acknowledgment that Barnes and his generation of writers are dying out, with references to conversations with Martin Amis, who himself died not long after this book was likely finished. Barnes gives his reason for wanting to close out his writing life deliberately: not wanting to die mid-book and leave something unfinished, citing his friend Brian Moore, who did just that with his own final novel. And yet there's also real wit in how Barnes handles arriving at this stage of life, resisting some of the old-man clichés even while acknowledging others.

Is This Really His Last Book?

I'm not sure we should take Barnes fully at his word that this is his last book. He notes himself, cheekily, that we can and should trust novelists when they tell us the beautiful lies of their fiction, but that we're allowed real skepticism when they describe their own working methods. Other authors have announced a "final" book only to keep publishing. Whether or not this genuinely is his last, though, felt somewhat beside the point to me — what's here is a real, fascinating engagement with these enormous subjects, even if I found myself wishing he'd gone further with some of them. Though, of course, an 800-page final book might have undercut the whole project; there's real craft in how compressed and anecdotal this is, jumping between memories, digressions, and different writers while still cohering. Reading it felt like sitting across from Julian Barnes as he talked through his life, which is part of why I love spending time with older writers and hearing their particular slant on meaning.

A Personal Aside on The Sense of an Ending

Barnes has explored this same terrain, fiction blurring into fact, memory versus objective history, most famously in “The Sense of an Ending”, his Booker Prize-winning novel. I reread it a few years ago, ahead of the new film adaptation, having first read it in my twenties, when it struck me as fairly thin. Rereading it in my forties, it hit me with far more force, and I found the story's exploration of a man's later-life reckoning with the unreliability of his own memory genuinely profound in a way it hadn't been the first time. I appreciated the film's own distinct take on it as well. That experience of a book changing meaning as you age with it feels like exactly the kind of thing Barnes is writing about in “Departure(s)”, and I suspect if I return to this new book in another ten or fifteen years, it'll land differently again.

Verdict

I'd love to hear from anyone who's read this: do you think it's really Barnes's last book, and do you think it ranks among his best? I hope it isn't his last, honestly, though we'll see. Whatever the case, this felt like a genuine celebration of literature and of the different ways we each read and are changed by the same books at different points in our lives — and it was a wonderful, if imperfect, experience to read.

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

This novel centres around Hai, a young man who is contemplating suicide at the beginning of the novel when suddenly a chance encounter allows him space for self-reflection and to forge new connections. I felt this is a very emotional story which meaningfully portrays the links between a group of working class people in New England while exploring issues like depression, drug addiction, aging, illness and failed dreams. But there's a lot of warm-hearted friendship and humour in the story as well in showing the quirks of this lively cast of characters and highlighting crass commercialisation through its portrayal of HomeMarket, a fast food restaurant where every day is Thanksgiving. Though this venue is fictional it feels like a very plausible American invention where all the food is mass produced but presented as if it were just cooked in the family kitchen. One of its employees Maureen appears to the public like a sweet old granny taking customer orders but in fact she's a foul-mouthed drinker who harbours conspiracy theories and must ice her arthritic knees with frozen packs of macaroni and cheese. She's also mourning the loss of her son and there are some exchanges she has with Hai about this which are so achingly tender. Hai also forms a strong kinship with Grazina, an older woman experiencing the onset of Alzheimer's who offers to house him. In exchange he becomes her carer and this poignantly demonstrates how friendship can grow between very different individuals.

Vuong's methodology is to shows us the fabrication of a certain picture of life fuelled by ideals while gradually revealing the difficult reality underneath. The story demonstrates that illusions can't be sustained whether it's the sugar-packed corn bread which appears to be nurturing but will cause diabetes, the tale of escaping from a war-torn country Hai invents for Grazina to help her navigate through her bad spells, his cousin Sony's belief that his father was a war hero with diamonds embedded in the palm of his hand or Hai's own invented life as a med student which he describes to his mother on the phone. Eventually it all comes crumbling down and the consequences can be delayed but eventually must be dealt with. Yet there's something about the culture that encourages these individuals to perpetuate such fantasies to the bitter end. For example, I felt HomeMarket's manager BJ was a very compelling character as she believes in the rhetoric of the fast food chain but also aspires to become a pro wrestler outside of that environment. However, this is all undermined by the regional manager who utterly trashes the way she allows this branch of HomeMarket to have small signs of individual identity.

I really appreciated how Vuong portrayed the atmosphere and environment of this fast food restaurant so dynamically. When I was at college and immediately after I graduated I worked at a Burger King as their maintenance man so I'm very familiar with the gritty reality of such a job – being plied with training videos, corporate lingo and hauling mass-produced boxes of food into the freezers. But these locations are also places where there's an interesting mingling of individuals (usually young and old) who are so distinct and a real camaraderie develops under the company's insistence on being a team and the daily close proximity to the other employees. I feel Vuong did an excellent job at capturing the nuance of this. He shows the many personalities of these workers and the familiarity they form – from being sensitive to each other's moods/individual needs to a physical awareness of one another. I like how he described this in an interview as “circumstantial family”. There's also a kind of groupthink which occurs in such an establishment where some employees feel compelled to really dedicate themselves to working for the perceived good of the restaurant. Many earnestly do such a physically demanding job even though they are paid so little. Of course, as the regional manager of HomeMarket demonstrates, the restaurant and the upper management really don't care about the employees except as parts of the establishment's human machinery. In contrast, there is the nearby recently-opened and eternally deserted pizza restaurant which we learn was launched by a family and it will sadly be doomed to failure when up against such a competitive corporate chain who offers their own inferior form of pizza as a new menu item. This feels like a stark symbol of how there is little chance of achieving the American dream as there's little opportunity outside the slick and pervasive force of large companies.

It was a pleasant surprise to me that this novel was so much about working life at this fast food restaurant but, of course, it also very much centres around Hai's connection with Grazina. I appreciated the contrast in these two individual's lives, one who is so young and struggling to establish a meaningful way forward and the other rapidly deteriorating due to Alzheimer's disease. The relationship they form is so poignant. It was touching to learn in the Oprah interview with Vuong that the character of Grazina and their connection was based on one which Vuong formed with his partner's grandmother. There are such vast differences between these two characters in their experiences and points of view but it's touching how there is genuine care and respect. They use this opportunity to learn from one another and really see each other – in a way that Grazina's own son doesn't when they travel to his household for dinner. This meal with her family forms such a stark contrast to the idealised Thanksgiving meal which the fast food restaurant offers where Grazina's home cooked dish is rapidly set aside and Grazina's family speak to her in a condescending way. It's so sad how the elderly in America are often pushed aside, put into homes and, as Vuong describes, cared for by working class individuals who are sacrificing their own family life to look after other people's parents. I know there's no easy solution to this issue, but I feel like this story is shining a light on that reality and it's tragic the way in which Hai who is the only one who genuinely cares about Grazina.

In terms of plot not much happens in this novel as the characters don't dramatically progress and change. Vuong has mentioned in many interviews how he intentionally did this as he disagrees with the notion that there must be a definite resolution in a story and in the lives of characters – as that doesn't happen in most people's lives. I know some readers have found this aspect of the novel frustrating but I appreciated spending time with the characters, observing their interactions and the confluence of their points of view – whether it's the racism which grill cook Wayne must endure, the way in which the employees deal with a drug user who frequents and overdoses in their restaurant or the terrifying excursion to a slaughter house some employees take in an effort to make extra money. To me this later scene was one of the stand out moments of the novel. Other parts and some aspects of the book didn't entirely work for me. I felt sometimes he leaned too far into the quirkiness of the characters with the weird sculpture Maureen makes Hai and the strange mission to try to retrieve the fictional diamond of Sony's father. I also felt the affair Hai has with one of the customers was dropped into the story a little too abruptly. In a way, I like that Hai's homosexuality is treated as just another aspect of his identity but their affair and connection seemed quite abrupt. Also, while there are some beautifully poetic descriptions Vuong also sometimes goes a little over the top with his metaphors and lyrical reveries. However, overall this is a moving and impactful novel.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

I was initially thrown by the description of this book as a spy novel. Instead of the moody suspenseful tale I was expecting I was surprised to find large portions of the book concern a philosophical treatise pondering the early years of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. The novel is told from the point of view of a very confident and cooly guarded woman who uses the undercover name Sadie. We follow how she gradually infiltrates an anti-capitalist eco commune through the old friend of its leader and her movements around an agricultural area of France. Presumably the year is 2013 since the sounds of Daft Punk’s song ‘Get Lucky’ can be heard everywhere Sadie travels. A large portion of the narrative concerns her reading and commenting upon the emails of Bruno Lacombe, a reclusive mentor to the commune who lives in a cave and believes he hears voices. His musings are curious to read about but initially I found the overall mode and conceit of this novel disorientating and overly ponderous. Nevertheless, I steadily got into its deliberation about our origins as humans and where our motivations come from. It's also fun to follow Sadie who is supremely judgemental but also a fallible individual who gets tipsy on wine and meets a new gay bestie named Vito.

The reader doesn't know much about this narrator since her profession requires that she remain anonymous. However, she refers to her jobs from the past and why she had to stop working undercover for a US government body after romantically entrapping a young man by convincing him to commit acts of eco-terrorism. Even before the examples were specifically referenced in the novel I recalled the UK undercover policing relationship scandals from the past couple of decades. It's outrageous that there have been numerous cases such as this where officers used a false identity and became romantically involved with the subjects they were spying on and, in some cases, had children with them. So it's logical that Sadie must be a steely individual only concerned with executing her job even if this includes emotional manipulation and morally bankrupt behaviour.

She indicates at one point that she doesn't even have an opinion about the issues at stake because she is simply performing her duty. Sadie believes this justifies her actions but I get the sense that she enjoys feeling superior to those around her. Additionally, Kushner has fun with inhabiting such a judgemental voice as Sadie freely makes catty comments about other people's appearance and French life. At one point she likens terrines to cat food and observes that the older/more rural the Frenchman the higher his pants will be belted. She also points out that only in France will you find talk shows with famous writers as guests because it's the only place where people think writers are interesting. These sly observations provide some levity amidst the more ponderous passages of the novel. Sadie is also extremely confident about her appearance as being attractive but not having any especially remarkable features which will make her stand out and thus she can remain relatively anonymous. However, she does have artificially enhanced breasts which she refers to multiple times and takes pride in and which I assume she had done to aide her in seducing the subjects she's spying on.

Bruno can be a bit of a windbag in his messages and he has eccentric ideas, but I found some of his diatribes pondering the origin of humans and our motivations interesting. Though she's reading these messages looking for clues about potential acts of sabotage, it seems like it's also forcing Sadie to think more in depth about deeper issues. Kushner repeatedly refers to the image of lines of poplar trees as it seems to connect with this long view of history or successive generations of humans stretching back to our most primal form. Bruno's earnestness is also endearing as he's desperately seeking an alternative for the path our civilization has taken. I also have a natural sympathy for people who form intentional communities and different ways of organising themselves. In my early adulthood I even visited a number of communes and considered joining one. However, I eventually realised that it's incredibly difficult to successfully organise a community along new lines without repeating the same mistakes as mainstream society. This certainly seems to be the case with Le Moulin, the commune Sadie enters into where there is a lot of talk and ideals but little practical action. Sadie joins them under the pretence of translating the group's co-written book opposing Capitalism. However, she is really there to report on and monitor their activities in the lead up to a planned demonstration at an agricultural fair and try to provoke one member to take the protest to even further extremes.

Sadie expresses the view that people's belief systems are merely a superficial way to “shore up their own identity.” She goes on to say “The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and 'beliefs,' is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is hard, white salt.” This image of the salt at the core of our being becomes quite significant to her and recurs especially towards the end of the novel. Is this a cynical view by an embittered person who has chosen a profession of necessary loneliness with no fixed identity? Are the beliefs that people hold so dearly really only superficial and fleeting? Or does our unique make up and system of beliefs form who we are? I think Kushner is raising all these questions with no certain answers but offers them through the lens of an individual who positions herself outside both mainstream society and the counterculture of this commune.

It's endearing that Sadie comes to feel so fond of Bruno and protective towards him – even remarking that the commune doesn't deserve him. I think she recognizes a kinship with him in his extreme isolation and rejection of society. They seem to have come to the same conclusions but have different approaches to navigating life. They're also both keen on considering deep time by staring into a dark cave of great depth or gazing into the stars in the night sky. This touchstone with history draws them out of the present moment, the present circumstances of our civilization and the (to their minds) tragic trajectory of Homo sapiens. Sadie also seems to want to take the place of Bruno's deceased daughter – however, he doesn't know her and has no idea that she's been reading his messages. So the only connection she can have with him is to engage with his system of beliefs and look to the stars (even if they aren't really stars but satellites.)

As you can see, this novel's spy story is somewhat secondary to the larger questions it raises regarding humanity, individual motivation and the trajectory of our civilization. Those looking for a plot which adheres to the genre conventions of spy novels might be disappointed by this. However, I heartily enjoyed Kushner's creative take on this sleuth's tale as its increasingly dramatic story ponders many prescient issues from a unique point of view. It's also a fascinating character study about an individual with no regard for the people she deceives. Yet cracks begin to show as she is prone to drinking, popping pills and ocular migraines. Kushner also incorporates a good deal of humour in how she presents Sadie's perspective. Additionally, there's an increasing complexity to this spy whose self-interested stance is muddled by the missives of a mysterious guru. There is a slow build up in the story as the first half of the novel is top heavy with Bruno's emails, but “Creation Lake” develops a good momentum as it leads up to the dramatic resolution and a potential reckoning for Sadie.

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

There's a down to earth and relatable quality to Enright's writing which makes it so wonderfully engaging. It's a slight of hand which might initially conceal that the prose is very sophisticated and biting. “The Wren, The Wren” opens with a passage about the discomforting weirdness of inhabiting a body and consciousness which had me instantly chuckling in recognition. The story continues as a young woman named Nell relates the experience of unexpectedly falling in love. However, this is anything but a saccharine tale of romance as her relationship with a rural muscular lad turns into something that is both exciting and disturbing.

Her experiences show how love affairs and long term relationships involve varying degrees of power play – something which has been true for past generations of Nell's family as well. The narrative alternates between Nell's perspective and that of her no-nonsense mother Carmel who lives independently and has mostly avoided any committed romance. Both live with the spectre of Carmel's deceased father Phil McDaragh, a poet of moderate fame who abandoned his family and ill wife to move to America seeking more personal and professional success. His poems bookend Carmel and Nell's accounts. They're full of airy talk about love and nature. The more that's related about this family's history the more hollow and posturing they appear.

Phil gave Carmel the dubious honour of dedicating one of his poems to her. It's a kind of gift but it also cements his girl and his relationship to her as something removed from reality. Enright seems to be disentangling the illusion created by fame with both this novel and her previous book “Actress” showing how the creation of public image and representation can be very different from personal experience. But really this issue of the spotlight being cast on a certain individual highlights and exaggerates issues we all have concerning authenticity. Through these women's accounts we see how lived experience is precariously removed from perceptions and representations of it – especially when these come from a dominant man. In turn, this skews self perception. Over the course of their story Carmel and Nell gradually find greater clarity about themselves and their family. The drama disentangles the mythology which has been built around a masculine poet and patriarchal figure.

One of Nell's statements which continues to haunt me is when she recalls how whenever she wanted a present Carmel always gave her exactly what she asked for. What she hoped for was a surprise. This story shows how our relationships with each other don't thrive if we only play out our expected roles as a daughter or son or mother or father. Instead we have to see the person as they really are: a unique individual who is constantly changing and trying to figure their lives out. This novel presents a meaningful family story where connections and relationships are tested in these charismatic individuals' ongoing quest for self-fulfilment.

Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks

It feels like some debut novels have been building up in an author's mind for their entire life. This is certainly the case with “Fire Rush”. In the bio for Jacqueline Crooks on the dust jacket it describes how she was involved in the music and political scene of migrant communities in 70s and 80s London and that she was “immersed in the gang underworld as a young woman.” This novel follows Yamaye through this same period of time. She spends her nights clubbing with friends at a venue which caters for the emerging dub music scene. But when a promising relationship is cut short because of a racist attack by the police, she's thrust into a movement of protest and criminality which eventually leads her to Bristol and Jamaica. At one point she muses “I wonder if one day I'll write a song, a sound memorial for the times we had. Those winter nights of music and heat, Asase, Rumer, Moose and me.” This innovative novel is that memorial because although it's fiction it is rich with the feeling of perilous young adulthood and prose which are infused with the music of British African-Caribbean culture. Reading it is a mesmerising, revelatory and utterly immersive experience.

What's immediately striking about this book is the voice of Yamaye which strongly captures her perspective as a creative young black woman in London. Both her narrative and the dialogue build a powerful sense of her personality and worldview. She resides in a housing estate with her emotionally-distant father, works a tedious job and longs for a connection with her absent mother. What gives her life is going to a club with her friends and chanting lyrics in her head which eventually burst out in public improv sessions when she takes to the mic. Although she finds inspiration and support from this community there's also an element of animosity. It's striking how she frames the slender options available to her when unwanted men grind against her in the club or when the police come knocking on her door. Also, her strong-willed close friend Asase is an ally but she also belittles Yamaye. On top of this is the larger threat of “Babylon” or the British establishment with police who target and spy upon both her and her community. It's inspiring witnessing Yamaye's growth over the course of the dramatic story. Although she experiences tragedy, heartbreak and violence she channels this into artistic expression. She also courageously fights to establish a space where she can feel at home.

There's a mural of black protest near to where I live in south London and its message really came alive for me when reading a section of this novel which features a march through Norwood that turns into a riot. These scenes are filled with evocative physical details and convey the emotional atmosphere of this confrontation in the streets. A visceral pain and anger for the way minorities have been systematically discriminated against and marginalized in this country is powerfully expressed throughout the story. Yamaye is deeply aware of the way her ancestors were subjugated on a day to day basis from the sugar she consumes to the nightmares that plague her. The story also meaningfully deals with the complexity of how to move forward as a society with options that range from complicity to flight to extremism. By following Yamaye's heartrending journey we experience the personal impact and difficulty of these larger events and debates.

The ongoing story lines of who might be snitching to the police in their local community and what happened to Yamaye's mother add compelling elements of mystery to the novel. Although I was fully engaged by this book, there were some elements of the plot that felt a little clunky to me. Circumstances surrounding a friend's incarceration are handled a little too swiftly, some encounters rely too heavily on coincidence and the ending came across as melodramatic. Also some of the short dream sequences dealt a bit too literally with the novel's central subjects. But these are minor quibbles considering the overall vibrancy of the utterly unique prose. It's a moving experience following the way Yamaye grows and transforms over the novel. This story may be set in the past but there is an urgency to Crooks' writing which successfully pays tribute to a movement and music scene which isn't part of mainstream history but whose influence is still strongly felt today.

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

Rape... murder... masochism... cannibalism... mutilation... sexual debauchery... incest... body horror... regurgitated sausages. Welcome to the medieval world as presented by Ottessa Moshfegh! Those who aren't instantly put off by such sordid elements will probably find that an over-indulgence in such bombastic grotesquery comes to feel humorous and absurd. Maybe it enhances rare moments of tenderness such as when a servant girl longingly dreams of her lost love or when a grieving beaten boy who never knew his mother suckles the empty breast of a kindly old woman. Or perhaps this fictional reimagining of past horrors comes to feel like a distorted mirror of the present where the majority toil under increasingly strained conditions while society's elite live in excess. Or could it just be there for shock value?

Whatever your interpretation of Moshfegh's writing it certainly inspires plenty of discourse. Her debut “Eileen” earned her credentials with multiple book award nominations and her musings of a sleepy heroine in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” became a big bestseller. “Lapvona” has already received a range of praise and damnation in literary circles. There is a mesmerising quality to this author's storytelling which drew me into the world of its naïve adolescent protagonist Marek. At first this son of a shepherd feels sympathetic with his unfortunate ugliness, twisted spine and mop of untended red hair. However, his pitiful desire for his father's punishment soon gives way to lowkey aggression and cruelty as he passively listens to the pleas of a dying boy. Over the course of a year he finds himself in a surprisingly close position to the town's lord and governor Villiam.

Marek is central to this story of a feudal land set in an unspecified place and in some archaic time period where peasants toil the land and live with the hope that their suffering will earn them points in the afterlife. But it's just as much a tale of this town's range of other inhabitants and the narrative frequently shifts to follow their points of view. We gradually discover hidden familial relations and a sinister scheme which drives the general population to starvation while Villiam indulges in his endless gluttony and demand for constant puerile and perverse entertainment. There's also the sometimes-blind elderly Ina who is called a witch, converses with birds and served as a wet nurse to most of the village. Later on she even helps “prepare” the men to repopulate the area. And a mysterious tongueless woman is rumoured to be carrying the new son of God and this disrupts the unequal order of this viciously brutal community. The way in which the reader is privy to information which certain characters are ignorant about creates an excellent feeling of suspense within this horrifyingly vivid story.

Randomly, I recently watched John Waters' film 'Desperate Living' for the first time. There are strange parallels to “Lapvona” in that both splinter away from reality to indulge in a carnival of debauchery centred around an imaginary feudal community. In the movie a mentally ill suburban housewife and her murderous nurse seek refuge in a shantytown ruled by an evil queen similar to Villiam in her insatiable appetite and pleasure in the suffering/humiliation of her subjects. Moshfegh and Waters make surprising but natural bedfellows in their invocations of immoral worlds filled with perversity and wild drama. Perhaps their rebellion against established orders show how continuous imbalances in society drive people to follow their most depraved instincts. Or that neither logic or faith hold up against the wilfulness of human experience which is always centred around the self. Towards the end of this novel, Moshfegh wryly comments “Right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by.” Whether you applaud her, cancel her or allow yourself to be entertained by her writing, this is a writer who is unafraid of sticking a pitchfork in conformity.

Appliance by J.O. Morgan

I fondly remember being a child and going on the Disney World ride 'Carousel of Progress' which demonstrates through a singing audio-animatronic American family how technology has benefited and improved the lives of each successive generation. We can get so caught up in the belief that “progress” will be nothing but an asset for us as individuals and as a species. Certainly people in the past had poorer living standards and worse medical treatment – but how does progress impact the planet? In what ways does it bind us to capitalism? And how does it change our sense of being unique individuals? These are questions at the heart of J.O. Morgan's novel “Appliance”. Through a series of vignettes we follow the development of a device which can instantly transport objects (and eventually people) from one place to another. Think Wonka Vision but without the shrinkage. We follow the reactions and the impact it has upon a series of characters who are like bystanders to this march of progress which demands they integrate this device into their lives whether they like it or not. Though this may sound like a book with a Luddite agenda, it's more an emotional and philosophical examination about how we can get caught up driving forward our society more for the sake of it rather than to benefit the people who inhabit it.

Since each chapter moves to an entirely new set of characters the novel demands patience as it's necessary to reorientate to a new situation. But there is a pleasure in discovering how the technology has moved on and the way it is affecting the lives of these different individuals. From the outside one naturally wants to marvel at a rapidly-improving device which begins by transporting a simple plastic spoon and progresses to the point where it can zap whole cities to the moon. However, what's so clever about this novel is how it focuses on the dangers, frustrations and bewilderment it causes to those who live with it. As the device advances the infrastructure around everyone deteriorates to the point where they become wholly reliant upon this technology. Every resource must be mined to feed it even as most people increasingly don't understand it.

The story also teases out questions of authenticity. It addresses how we are biological beings which continuously regenerate: “The person we were yesterday is not composed of exactly the same stuff as the person we are today. Just as we can't be sure we are the same person who wakes up each morning, unless we stay awake all through the night.” If we can be wholly mapped and recreated elsewhere what aspect of our being is really individual? In each successive story the characters come to feel less authentically themselves and less intelligent. Those who protest against the system which demands they use this device find that their objections are met with indifference. Those who infiltrate the system find themselves being drawn into becoming a part of it. Everyone else blithely goes along with it though the quality of their lives doesn't necessarily improve. Though the premise of this story is like something you'd find in science fiction it feels eerily relatable and relevant to the world today. I got the creepy sense from reading this novel that technology would never need to become self-aware in order to enslave us as we're unwittingly allowing it to control us already.

More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman (translated by Jessica Cohen)

The older I get the more I contemplate what I can never know about past generations of my family. Even as I've tried to outline the facts and piece together story fragments, I know that there won't ever be a way to truly understand what my ancestors went through or why they made certain decisions. This is a subject Maria Stepanova rigorously contemplated as she sifted through family mementoes and records in her fascinating and extensive book “In Memory of Memory”. One of her conclusions seemed to be that whatever narrative we construct about the past doesn't necessarily give us any substantial insight or meaning. Equally, David Grossman rigorously questions the intention and value of documentation when it comes to examining family history in his compelling and moving puzzle box of a novel “More Than I Love My Life”. 

The book opens with a narrator recounting the story of her parents and grandparents' lives on a kibbutz in the 1960s. It doesn't occur to this narrator to introduce herself as Gili until we're deep into the complicated relationships of her immediate family. She's enthralled with their stories (even though they occurred long before she was born) and they give the sense of having been told and retold so many times they've developed into a personal mythology. After the death of her grandfather Tuvia's first wife he married a Yugoslavian immigrant named Vera. Tuvia's son Rafael also falls for Vera's daughter Nina, but it's an unequal love affair as Nina is hampered by the violent circumstances of WWII and life under President Tito. Gili feels a deep anger towards her mostly-absent mother Nina as she's led a promiscuous life full of wanderlust. However, Gili is also aware that Nina's problems stem from something which happened when she was a girl – an unaddressed betrayal by Nina's mother Vera.

The second half of the novel takes place in 2008 when Gili and her father Rafael decide to record a documentary about Vera who has just turned 90 years old. Nina has returned for her mother's birthday and also reveals she's suffering from an illness which will cause her to prematurely lose her memory. In order to memorialise Vera's life and create an account which Nina's future self can use as a reference point, this family of four embark on a journey back to Vera's homeland as she recounts the horrors she endured during wartime. Many secrets and revelations emerge which lead to emotional confrontations. All the while, Gili and Rafael endeavour to film and interview Vera to better understand her life. It becomes clear that no matter how rigorously or honestly they try to document her account they won't ever fully understand what she lived through or why she made choices which put both herself and Nina at risk. Interestingly, in some sections the narrative slips to Vera's intensely gruelling imprisonment at Goli Otok, a barren island known as the “Croatian Alcatraz” that was used as a political prison when Croatia was part of Yugoslavia. In their earnest attempt at preserving Vera's memories and forming a reconciliation, they are left with more questions than answers.

I greatly appreciated how this complex and entrancing story explores issues to do with family, self-worth, the past and truth. The way it dramatises its characters yearning for understanding and a sense of belonging made me deeply feel for them. Though some scenes that occur in the present felt needlessly melodramatic I still got caught up in the intense feelings involved. This novel painfully shows that love doesn't necessarily allow for justice – especially when under the intensely pressurised circumstances of national upheaval when life is lived “on the edge of a knife”.

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

We're accustomed to reading coming of age stories that attempt to faithfully reproduce the experience of growing up and the transition into adulthood, but “Checkout 19” by Claire-Louise Bennett takes a radical new approach. The narrative is an account of a young woman reflecting on her life thus far and roughly follows the linear trajectory of her development. Events such as period pains, moving to a rapidly-growing city, a tumultuous romantic relationship and a traumatic occurrence are recounted. However, her experiences have been refashioned by the process of memory till they feel like smoothed stones lodged in the gut: “I experience, every few years, an urge to recall this moment and the events that preceded it. Not only to recall it, but to write it down, again. Again.” We don't necessarily get a fully rounded picture of an event but an impression of the predominant feeling which remains because of certain encounters or experiences. Her account adheres to a different form of truth which is influenced as much by the imagination as it is by history. This is a life dominated by reading and writing which are just as real or more real than concrete experience. The story isn't so much a quest to know what is true, but a refreshingly honest account of this state of being. 

The reading life permeates her experience to the degree that when thinking back to certain time periods they are more dominated by lists of what authors she'd read or not read at that point rather the particulars of her circumstances. As I was reading these sections I found it geekily pleasurable mentally ticking off which authors I've also read, which I still want to read and which I've not heard of before. Moreover, Bennett writes in such a compelling and sympathetic way about the process of reading: “Certain written words are alive, active, living – they are entirely in the present, the same present as you. In fact, it feels as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear, in any case, certain sentences do not feel in the least bit separate from you or from the moment in time when you are reading them. You feel they wouldn't exist without your seeing them. Like they wouldn't exist without you. And isn't the opposite true too – that the pages you read bring you to life? Turning the pages, turning the pages. Yes, that is how I have gone on living. Living and dying and living and dying, left page, right page, and on it goes.” This is such a gorgeous description of the dynamic way we interact with the text of books and why we connect so strongly to certain literature.

As she continues to read throughout her life she becomes aware of not only the sexism which permeates some literature but the gendered way readers are treated. This naturally draws her to only read female authors: “There came a point I don't know when exactly when I'd read enough books by men for the time being. It happened quite naturally – I don't recall deciding I'd had enough and wasn't going to read any more books by men for a while, it was just that I began reading more and more books by women and that didn't leave me much time anymore to read any books by men.” This is such a glorious way of putting to rest the assumed superiority certain male authors project, but equally Bennett skewers the way certain male readers arrogantly claim literature as belonging to them exclusively. “Women can't withstand poetry, seemed to be Dale's view. Women are beautiful and tender creatures and poetry breaks them, of course it does. Poetry rips right through you, makes shit of you, and a man can be made through you, makes shit of you, and a man can be made shit of and go on living because no one really minds, not even the man. The man likes it in fact, likes to be made shit of so that he can sit there and drink his head off and declaim one epithetical thing after another and all the other interminably taciturn men believe he is an exceptional man...” Reading this I found myself frantically nodding along recalling some self-consumed self-righteous male readers I've encountered.

There were plenty of other passages I connected with as well. In her childhood she describes the experience of being made to work in a group at school and how the result of these collaborative projects was disappointing compared to the quality work she knew she could do if working on her own. I definitely shared this kind of solitary work ethic. Even though I felt a strong connection to some parts of this novel, there were also other sections and tangents which eluded me and felt so abstract I honestly can't pretend to know what they are about. Perhaps my confusion partly comes from the unique way the author's account is a blend of the past and the fiction she wrote. When recounting a memory of a train journey she describes how: “I've a feeling I was wearing a green hat but I might be wrong about that, that might have been the woman I made up years later who takes a train to see friends of hers a day earlier than they expect”. Though this is intriguing and playful it can also be quite disorientating for the reader. Some parts of the book concern a fictional character named Tarquin Superbus whose quest to find the single sentence written in a library of otherwise blank books goes awry. As curious and bewitchingly whimsical as these sections are they felt at times like a distraction from the more interesting narrator's point of view.

Though the bulk of the novel is written in the first person, the opening and closing sections are narrated in the collective “we”. It feels like the individual is a twin being that is in constant dialogue with herself. She reinforces the validity of her point of view by agreeing and building upon it. This creates an oddly hypnotic rhythm which is reminiscent of a Beckett play. Part of me would have liked to see the entire novel written in this way. But then I would miss the forceful and directly personal way that this story is a celebration of books as they are exchanged, discussed, revered, dismissed and ignored. It does not just list authors but shows the physical presence of books, the room they take up, the difficulty in moving/keeping them and letting them go. It's also a testament of the impulse to create, to revise, to fashion out of experience an impression of life which is universal. It's the force which gives meaning to our existence when we're stuck in a job which is as tediously repetitive as scanning items at a store's checkout.

Actress by Anne Enright

I have a special fondness for novels that are about actresses/actors. Two of my favourite books are Joyce Carol Oates’ “Blonde” about the actress Norma Jean Baker who becomes the persona Marilyn Monroe and Susan Sontag’s “In America” about the Polish actress Helena Modjeska who helped found a utopian community in the late 1800s. I even wrote my MA dissertation on these novels and how both writers explore the borders between identity and performance in their stories. I also have a love for Anne Enright’s writing as few other current authors are able to write about family, love and national identity the way she can as exemplified in her previous novel “The Green Road” which is a fascinating depiction of all these things.

This means that “Actress” is the perfect novel for me and it fully delivered because I absolutely adored it. It’s told from the perspective of Norah, a writer who has written five novels and now feels ready to tell the story of her mother Katherine O’Dell who died at the relatively early age of 58. At the height of her mother’s career she was a great actress of Broadway and Hollywood and, at the lower end of it, found herself doing TV commercials and became the focus of a tabloid scandal. Though her mother’s star faded long ago and Norah herself is much older, the effects of that celebrity and the uneasy relationship it created between them are still something Norah wrestles with. In this story Norah tries to piece together a history of Katherine’s life and the real impact of her fame.

Something I find so engaging about Enright’s writing is that almost every sentence feels like it’s layered with a delicious form of irony. Norah’s backward glance at her childhood and Katherine’s life is coloured by this humorous point of view where certain things seem obvious now when they may have not been at the time. For instance, she understands now that her mother struggled with her finances though she continued to live as if she were affluent, many of the romantic men who hovered around her mother were in fact gay and when her mother made excuses for not spending time with her daughter after a show it was really because she wanted to be alone. These are things she probably intuitively knew at the time, but seeing things in retrospect makes them much clearer – or apparently so because it’s easy to place an interpretation on events which are long past. Nevertheless, I found Norah’s cynical tone about the whole artifice of fame and the theatrical world very amusing.

Part of Katherine’s struggle as an artist is that she finds herself typecast as embodying a certain romanticised view of old Ireland. Norah frequently comments on how Katherine feels pressured to uphold this image in her dress and dyed red hair. It’s upheld even more when her mother makes an advertisement for Irish butter which becomes infamous and Enright’s description of the over-the-top ad is hilarious. But it’s interesting how Katherine’s struggle to break away from this image also mirrors the country’s shifting politics and characters over the decades. Norah poignantly recounts her experiences during The Troubles and how these events make everything change but, at the same time, nothing changes: “A funny thing happens when the world turns, as it turned for us on the night we burned the British Embassy down. You wake up the next morning and carry on.” Through this story Enright gives a fascinating view on an evolving sense of what it means to be Irish.

I also really appreciate the dynamic way Enright writes about love and sex. The public endlessly speculate about Katherine’s sexual life as does Norah herself as she’s not entirely certain who her mother slept with or who her own father is. But the reader is drawn more into Norah’s own sexual history and relationship with sex as she describes her uninhibited views about it. When pondering the nature of sex she poignantly describes the complicated interplay between the imagination and reality and points out that there is a “difference between what happens in your head and what happens in the room. The big difference.” Interestingly, the novel is largely narrated in the second person as Norah is directing her recollections at her husband with whom she has a very complicated relationship.

Finally, I very much enjoyed the occasional commentary Enright makes about sleep and sleeplessness throughout the novel. She makes very relatable points about the inner struggle everyone has when waking up in the night and whether to go to the toilet or try to get back to sleep. I also liked her observation about how uncomfortable a bed feels when you’re trying to get to sleep but when you wake up in the morning it feels like the most comfortable place in the world. Enright excels at such pithy down-to-earth observations while also creating a larger family story with compelling ideas about identity. It’s what makes reading this author such an enriching and enjoyable experience.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

I was really looking forward to this novel as the subject matter intrigued me and I’ve been wanting to read more by Rushdie, but I ended up feeling mostly negative towards it. “Quichotte” is Rushdie’s modern day version of ‘Don Quixote’ and primarily concerns Ismail Smile (who dubs himself Quichotte.) He travels across the US on a foolhardy romantic quest to woo Salma R, a famous television personality. In the process he surveys how fiction has become fact and many facts are treated as fiction in this modern day America. This exposes the absurdity of this state of being and captures the tragi-comic position we’re now in while especially highlighting the contentious issues of gun control laws and a corrupt pharmaceutical industry. A certain character muses at one point, “America, what happened to your optimism, your new frontiers, your simple Rockwell dreams?” The novel is justifiably preoccupied with this doleful question.

If the novel had been confined to Ismail’s episodic tales I believe I’d have found this a much more satisfying and pleasurable read. However, Rushdie soon adds a meta-fictional layer where we learn that Ismail’s story is being written by another character named Sam DuChamp, a writer of spy thrillers who is trying out a new kind of novel. This creates another layer which begs the questions: are we writing our own stories or are our stories writing us? What happens when the stories we tell ourselves become both our mental and physical reality? While these narrative gymnastics might be good in concept they felt misjudged and too confusing to me. In addition, the stories of many other characters and sub-plots proliferate throughout the novel such as that of Sam’s sister, a famous London lawyer who has reached a pivotal point in her life. In itself her story is an interesting one but it felt swallowed by the grander self-conscious narrative being constructed. This results in all these tales feeling so over controlled (and sometimes contrived) that I seldom felt any emotional engagement.

It was difficult at times to intellectually engage with the novel as well except the occasional interestingly framed statement. For instance, many of the characters have family secrets and Sam feels this dilemma: “The narrative of your family which you had carried within you, within which in a way you had lived, was false. Or, at the very least, that you had been ignorant of its most essential truth which had been kept from you. Not to be told the whole truth, as sister with her legal expertise would know perfectly well was to be told a lie. That lie had been his truth.” So this builds to a larger question threaded throughout the novel which asks how much truth we’re able to bear both on personal, familial and national levels. If our fundamental beliefs about ourselves, our families and our national identity are shaken are we really happier believing in lies?

Too often these statements and ideas felt like they were pronouncements from Rushdie himself rather than any of the characters. The integrity of his characters is sometimes tested in Rushdie’s use of humour. There are some genuinely funny moments especially in scenes involving Quichotte’s whimsical frame of mind where his idea of the classics are TV dating game shows or when he becomes so delusional that he starts conversing through a TV with a newscaster. But, at other times, the humour feels like it’s being made at the expense of his characters such as when a doctor proposes treating Salma R’s mental health problems with shock treatments and she declares herself “unshockable” or how when she does receive those treatments she describes the experience as a Christmas visit from “sanity Claus”. These feel more like cheap gags rather than details building a believable character. Nor are they satirical statements with deeper meaning.

Since I primarily read this novel because it’s shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, it’s interesting to compare it to the novel “Ducks, Newburyport”. Both novels self-consciously consider topical political and social issues in America. And both novels have eerily similar climatic scenes of violence. But these books take a radically different approach to telling their stories. Ellmann’s novel is wholly consumed with the inner life and thoughts of her narrator (except for the sparingly-told tale of the mountain lion.) In contrast, Rushdie’s sprawling novel somersaults through the inner lives of many characters while self-consciously playing with narrative form. He even portentously declares his intention with this novel using the character of Sam who feels himself guided by Cervantes and Arthur C. Clarke. Sam seeks to frame his novel about Quichotte in a picaresque literary tradition: “the episodes of such a work could encompass many manners, high and low, fabulist and commonplace, how it could be at once parodic and original, and so through its metamorphic roguery it could demonstrate and seek to encompass the multiplicity of human life.”

Rushdie certainly manages to capture the multiplicity of life as well as many pressing issues, but this exhausting spoof about our tenuous relationship with truth loses a lot of the pleasure and solace to be found in fiction.

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

I can think of few classic novels that have had such a widespread influence on both popular culture and literature as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus”. Even if people haven’t read Shelley’s novel they have a sense of Doctor Frankenstein’s creation from the many films which have (mistakenly) portrayed him as a senseless monster. I even went to a show recently called Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster where talented young musicians from the BAC Beatbox Academy re-created the body of the monster in song as a way of describing terrifying issues and people they experience in everyday life. But Shelley’s characters, ideas and powerful story have also permeated the imaginations of so many novelists since the book’s initial publication in 1818. Most recently it’s been directly referenced and reimagined in the novels “Frankenstein in Baghdad” by Ahmed Saadawi and Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel “Frankissstein”. Winterson’s novels have always had strong ties to the work of past writers (most notably Virginia Woolf) but her recent novels more strongly incorporate this influence such as her remix of The Winter’s Tale in her novel “The Gap of Time”.

“Frankissstein” goes a step further creating a dual narrative which switches back and forth between a historical section where we see Mary Shelley writing her famous novel and a near future where a non-binary individual named Ry Shelley engages in a complicated romantic relationship with a secretive scientist named Professor Stein. The historical sections have a more philosophical feel as Mary engages in meaningful discussions with her husband, the poet Byron and other interesting figures from the time period. The modern section is much more playful as it initially begins at a convention where a madcap capitalist named Ron promotes the use of his advanced range of sexbots designed to suit everyone’s emotional and physical needs. There’s even a Germaine Greer sex doll! Meanwhile, Professor Stein gives a lecture about the future of humans in a post-human world and engages in some edgy scientific experimentation. While the tone of these two narrative threads sound totally at odds with each other they feel strangely cohesive – especially as the novel increasingly becomes concerned with questions about the advancement of our species, the meaning of consciousness and the complicated dynamics of love: “Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.” The novel also has a political edge engaging with issues to do with feminism, gender identity, ethics and Brexit.

One of Winterson’s greatest talents is mixing an ardent seriousness in her writing with a richly playful sensibility to form stories that are both engaging and deeply poignant. Initially I felt more emotionally engaged by Mary’s 19th century tale and her struggles with marriage, friendship, money and nationality. But as the story progressed I became more attached to the character of Ry (whose shortened name could be a part of the names Mary or Ryan.) Ry encounters prejudice because of their gender identity and also develops a strong sexual connection and relationship with Professor Stein who is frustrated because falling for Ry wasn’t a part of his plan. Both Mary and Ry find themselves oddly positioned in relation to men whose grandiose ideas about mankind’s advancement don’t encompass matters to do with the human heart. In a sense, Mary and Ry are a continuation of the same person who has changed through the centuries like Woolf’s “Orlando”. In this way Winterson brilliantly messes with the perceived linear nature of time and the way certain issues emerge continuously amidst society’s progression: “Our lives are ordered by the straight line of time, yet arrows fly in all directions. We move towards death, while things we have scarcely understood return and return wounding us for our own good.”

The novel also considers ideas about storytelling itself - both in forming fictional narratives and the narrative of history. Mary Shelley was in the unusual position of producing a brilliant novel so early in her life and its themes go on to haunt her as Winterson shows how her life plays out in subsequent years. I like how Winterson considers how oddly abstract experience becomes when it’s formed into a story: “Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.” But I also appreciate how she confronts popular notions of nationalism and that the idea of Britishness is just another story we’re telling ourselves: “The timeless serenity of the past that we British do so well is an implanted memory – you could call it a fake memory. What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold – until it’s time to call in the wrecking ball.” I think this notion is good to keep in mind when any politician cites historical references to support their own ideological campaigns.

While I like to linger on many lines in Winterson’s novels (she’s a very quotable author) because she can poignantly encapsulate powerful ideas in few words, sometimes these grand statements pull me out of the flow of the story. The point of view can at times feel more like Winterson’s rather than her characters. There’s also occasional clunky lines such as a discussion about feminism where Mary self-consciously names her mother in a way that’s more for the reader’s benefit rather than for the characters she’s conversing with: “My mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, would not agree with you, I said.” Yet, these are minor quibbles I had with a novel I so thoroughly admire and enjoyed. I like reading novels which aren’t afraid to converse so self-consciously with stories that have come before. I think “Frankissstein” does this artfully while making a tale that is entirely new and immensely fun to read.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

I've wanted to read more of Nelson's books since I first encountered her breakout 'The Argonauts' a few years ago. Her approach to contemplating certain ideas and their personal impact is so striking and thought-provoking. I picked up this book (first published ten years ago) because she gave a fascinating talk at the Southbank Centre in London. 'Bluets' considers her powerful attraction to the colour blue, its manifestations in ordinary objects and art as well as its symbolism in paintings, songs and writing. She originally intended its subject to remain within these boundaries and join in a literary tradition which considers colour. But when writing it she also included references to the break down of a love affair and her close friendship with a woman who has become a quadriplegic. Her musings weave through the analytical and personal to present a striking way of thinking about our perceptions, emotions and language. 

I've also always felt the appeal of the colour blue. It has a warmth to it but also induces a melancholy feeling. People have always remarked on how strikingly blue my eyes are. Once I was in a group where we were asked to organize ourselves in a line from people whose eyes are deepest brown to those whose eyes are the brightest blue. The group decided my eyes are the bluest and for some reason this felt like a great compliment to me. Nelson considers “Does the world look bluer from blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement).” It's a romantic idea but a ridiculous one. This is part of the reason I appreciate Nelson's point of view though. She takes her research and political views seriously but at the same time she playfully toys with the theoretical and enjoys the teasing pleasure that can be had with language.

I appreciate that Nelson describes how her collection of blue objects feels meaningful to her even though she can't recall their origins or significance. All that's left is their beauty. I think we have a similar relationship to cherished memories of events and people in our lives. There's a feeling that resonates when we recall them even if we can't recreate all the details of the past. She describes how “blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.” Quite often she describes experiencing the colour blue like a sensation that is beyond words – as are the feelings it generates. Therefore, she sets herself the impossible task of trying to describe something which can't be summed up, but what she provides instead are approximations and discussions around the meaning of the colour blue.

Nelson also engages in serious dialogue with writers, philosophers and artists from the past who have written about colour. Sometimes she looks to their texts for knowledge or support for her own theories. Other times she repudiates the folly of their reasoning. For instance, she takes issue with the way William Gass asserts we can't see what we really desire in reality and that it's better to look in fiction for it because there the desire can be perfectly encapsulated in words and our imaginations. Nelson asserts: “I will not choose between the blue things of the world and the words that say them: you might as well be heating up the poker and readying your eyes for the alter. Your loss.” There is both pleasure and pain to be found when engaging in reality with all its attendant imperfections. It'd be a mistake to close oneself off to its jagged contours.

In a way I'm surprised I found this book to be as emotional as it is intellectually stimulating. Normally I get frustrated when authors withhold details that convey the core impulse driving them to write about a particular subject. Nelson refers to the breakdown of her relationship only glancingly and yet I felt the weight of its enormous loss all the same. She describes the debilitating feeling of being alone: “I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.” She also asks “what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?” Perhaps it's not so mad to be in love with a thing that's so beautiful specifically because it's incapable of loving you back. If it can't reciprocate feelings it's also incapable of rejecting you.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh has a particular talent for writing about vile characters in an engaging way. Her novel “Eileen” portrayed an excruciatingly self-conscious protagonist recalling a dark mystery from many year ago. But where the protagonist of that novel was repulsed and embarrassed by her own body, the unnamed narrator of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” takes easy pride in her beauty and size two figure. But she doesn’t see this as an advantage as she slyly observes “Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.” She’s an art history graduate that comes from a privileged background who sets herself the goal of sleeping as much as possible for a year. Her reasons for this goal are elusive at first and appear to be nothing more than the whim of a jaded spoiled young woman, but gradually it takes on more poignancy as she describes her difficult relationship with her mother and the disappointingly shallow experience of working in an art gallery. This takes place in New York City over the years 2000-2001 and she seems to be asking during this ominous period in which George Bush Jr takes office whether it’s more sensible to sleep through life than live it. Reading this novel is perversely pleasurable with its weary view of the world and the narrator’s overwhelming devotion to her hero Whoopi Goldberg who embodies for her the idea that “Nothing was sacred.”

The narrator has an all-consuming scepticism about human emotions and can’t engage in meaningful exchanges. She reflects “I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me.” Her only friend is an old college buddy named Reva who is perpetually insecure, suffers from an eating disorder and aspires to obtain the narrator’s privilege and waist line. But the narrator barely tolerates her and breezily ignores Reva when she confesses that her mother is suffering from cancer or that she has an unwanted pregnancy. Equally any emotion Reva displays towards the narrator is awkwardly accepted like when Reva hugs her at one point and the narrator observes how “I felt like a praying mantis in her arms.” The narrator regularly sees a quack psychiatrist named Dr Tuttle (when she doesn’t sleep through their scheduled appointment) but only in order to obtain worryingly strong doses of sleep medication to aide her in sinking into an unconscious oblivion. Hilariously her doctor can’t even recall that the narrator’s parents are both dead even after she’s told this multiple times and makes extensive notes.

“Wherever she went, everything around her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see. Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred. Whoopi was proof.”

It’s rational to assume at first that the narrator’s desire for sleep is connected to the loss of her parents, especially her emotionally absent mother who she only ever felt close to when they were unconscious in the same bed. But this easy interpretation of the narrator’s goal is refuted when she reflects about her mother’s death: “the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother – complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows.” Instead of building relationships or looking for a sense of self-worth when she’s conscious she only seeks to lose herself in an endless stream of rewatched VHS tapes of movies from the 80s and 90s. It gives her a temporary sense of detachment from reality that can only be perfectly realised in “Good strong American sleep.”

While it can be enjoyable to indulge in the narrator’s frank and nihilistic view of the world, the novel took on more poignancy for me as I pondered why Moshfegh set it at this particular point in American history. It’s a period leading up to an event which is ominously foreshadowed throughout the novel when it’s casually mentioned the narrator’s ex-boyfriend works in the Twin Towers. It ultimately began to feel like the author wished she could wake up from the string of tragic events and toxic culture that has plagued the country in the 21st century thus far and dismiss it all as a nightmare. Looking at it this way, it begins to make sense that the narrator considers “I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.” The great tragedy of this novel is that the narrator can’t ever escape herself or the history she’s trapped in.