The Story of the Forest by Linda Grant

One of the most excitingly unforeseen results of starting this book blog was being invited to travel to Riga and discover more about current Latvian literature. My great grandfather was born in Latvia and moved to the US to avoid being conscripted into the army during WWI. My family has always been proud of that Latvian heritage and traveling there was a longterm goal so it was a thrill to finally experience life in Riga and connect with a cousin I've never met. I made a video about that experience which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5HHP5AfG1k

All this preamble is to say I instantly felt a strong connection to Linda Grant's new novel which follows the life of Mina Mendel, a girl born in Latvia who emigrates to England in the early 20th century. She's separated from the majority of her Jewish family because of the war and the narrative traces the experiences of the Mendels – the ultimate fates of whom are not all known. In part, it's framed like a fairy tale: a girl goes to pick mushrooms in the forest and her life is irrevocably changed. However, it's clever how the novel is more about the ways in which this family forms a personal mythology. As we follow them through the years and different generations we see the ways in which storytelling is part of what binds this group together no matter how much the stories stray from history and the truth. The novel traces how the family's past intersects with larger socio-political events so their fates are more often influenced by happenstance than by their own free will. From a tight-knit working class Jewish community in Merseyside to the machinations of the film industry, their lives are portrayed in vivid, humorous and loving detail.

At first I wasn't sure about the nature of the story which initially centres around Mina and her brother Jossel's attempt to emigrate to America. It's compelling following how larger events disrupt their plans and cause them to grow new roots in a place where they hadn't planned to settle. Yet I found it initially disorientating reading occasional flashes into the future where we learn about the fates of future generations before the narrative has caught up to them. But gradually this structure developed a poignancy as the story becomes more splintered by the dispersement of family and the uncertainty about the truth of their origins. Names are changed. Connections are lost. History is forgotten. Eventually all the descendants are left with is speculation about their family past and an inherited object which takes the form of a somewhat ugly coffee pot. This feels very true to life and will resonate with anyone who has attended a family reunion where pieces of stories are recounted whilst studying obscure items that have been passed down through the generations.

There was another surprising personal connection I felt with the story when at one point the family receives an anonymous anti-Semitic note through the door. This naturally leads to a sense of anxiety that some of their neighbours harbour resentment towards them and they take measures to try to assimilate. It's no wonder that part of the reason aspects of family history are lost because details are suppressed or altered in different periods for the sake of survival. This also showed how little changes because several years ago my boyfriend and I temporarily moved to an area of North London. Soon after settling in we received an anonymous note through the letterbox urging us to change our homosexual lifestyle and warned that our friends were laughing behind our backs. (We failed to see how many of our gay friends would be laughing at our lifestyle.) Though we tried to laugh this off, it was also unsettling being made to feel like some anonymous individual or few people who lived around us in this new environment were secretly disapproving and hostile towards us.

Grant's novel shows that there will always be intolerant individuals who feel they own certain communities and everyone who inhabits that space should be a mere reflection of them. It's also clever in how it demonstrates the fragile value of ideologies when tested against the full spectrum of society. When Mina is a naïve girl the men she meets in the forest impress her with their Bolshevik ideas and these beliefs ferment in her mind over the course of her life. But she discovers the relative impact of these ideas when discussing them with women in a munitions factory during the war as well as learning about the deadly consequences the Soviet Union has upon her native Latvia. Though this novel is largely set in Britain, it's interesting to compare the historical events portrayed within Latvia in the novel “Soviet Milk” - my review of this book is what eventually led to the invitation to visit Riga. It shows how things come full circle. So I was very glad to read Grant's new novel which comes with a touching author's note explaining her own personal relationship to this tale. Overall, as well as being a poignant meditation on family and the flow of time, “The Story of the Forest” is also a highly entertaining story.

The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman (translated by Leslie Camhi)

It's a solemn fact of every child's life that they are incapable of truly knowing what their parents' lives were like before they were born. To the child, parents are initially only known for their roles as parents rather than individuals (whatever the quality of their parenting.) In the first part of Violaine Huisman's debut novel the narrator describes her mother's manic behaviour caused by mental illness and societal constraints. Maman could be loving to the point of clinginess towards her and her sister. But she could also be abusive, self-destructive and maddeningly unhinged. She's also beautiful, witty and charismatic. Given her volatile personality it's no wonder she became alienated from many people around her and her daughters grew to have such ambiguous feelings towards her. In an effort to build a deeper understanding of her mother Catherine and “give her back her humanity”, the narrator builds a work of fiction about her Maman's early life based on what she's been told and the (oftentimes contradictory) information about her. It's a loving project which is full of drama and compassionate insight as we come to understand a more dynamic picture of this vibrant woman's life. 

It's striking how the narrator concedes this account of her mother's life is a work of imagination but that she also endeavours to be an impartial vessel to deliver this story. If it was framed differently it might not have as much of an emotional resonance as it's an account of invention and speculation. However, I found this to be a very moving novel and I think it's a balancing act which works so powerfully as a conscious act of empathy. Because it's established early on how challenging it was to grow up with Catherine as a mother, this story she creates becomes both a love letter and a gesture of forgiveness. Any child who has been a victim of parental abuse knows how difficult it is to move beyond the anger and pain felt towards parents that didn't nurture their child in the way they should have done. In this way, this novel is perhaps the antithesis of Avni Doshi's novel “Burnt Sugar” which so powerfully describes an adult child's implacable fury towards a neglectful parent. By contrast, Huisman grants the mother figure a kind of freedom by vividly describing the qualities and faults which made Catherine a fully rounded individual. It's a beautiful and worthy project which builds to a uniquely poignant conclusion. 

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

When a couple decide to get married it's a nerve-wracking experience arranging for the parents to meet for the first time. Monica Ali's “Love Marriage” opens with Yasmin travelling with her parents to the home of her fiancé Joe and his mother. Though Joe's mother Harriet is a feminist and scholar who has published a progressive sexually-explicit book, Yasmin is too nervous to even mention sex in her household because of her parents' traditional values. So she has even more cause to worry about how their very different families will get on. The story describes how these individuals become heavily entangled in each other's lives amidst planning for Yasmin and Joe's marriage. Certain aspects of all their identities have remained hidden, but as they come closer to making a commitment the truth about the past and these characters' desires comes out into the open. There's a wonderfully engaging quality to Ali's style of writing which makes so many of these characters feel instantly familiar. I greatly enjoyed reading this romantic drama which involves the complexities of modern relationships, misunderstandings between generations, cross-cultural tensions and issues in the medical profession. 

It's moving how Yasmin's character develops over the course of the novel so she gradually comes to question what she really wants in life (both professionally and romantically) and how she underestimates her parents. Her experience diligently training to become a doctor contrasts sharply with that of her brother Arif who wants to make a documentary that he'll post on YouTube. Equally, the way he pursues a relationship is very different from Yasmin. However, the novel teases out assumptions which are made concerning career choices and the path couples take showing how there is no single way to live one's life. It also openly addresses different levels of racism and Islamaphobia and how the dialogue surrounding this in both liberal and conservative circles of British society can involve misconceptions, oversensitivity and hypocrisy. Since Harriet is a writer and knows a number of other authors there are also discussions between the characters involving the purpose of the novel itself and whether an author should only write about their own experience or allow themselves to imaginatively create stories of other lives.

Though the novel openly addresses these and many other issues, the characters are fully rounded so I felt really involved with the way Ali dramatises their inner and outer conflicts. One of the most fascinating characters is Yasmin's mother Anisah who undergoes a feminist awakening and starts to develop her own business selling chutneys. Though Yasmin's parents have always maintained theirs was a love marriage (as opposed to an arranged marriage) there's a question surrounding how they got together which hangs in the background until the truth is finally revealed. As so often is the case, what we perceive on the surface is very different from what's going on inside of people's experience. The pressure this causes builds throughout many different characters' lives. It's touching following how Yasmin gradually comes to a more dynamic understanding of those closest to her and herself in this tale filled with suspense, humour and wit.

Wayward by Dana Spiotta

The premise of Dana Spiotta's new novel “Wayward” really drew me in as it concerns a woman named Samantha in her early 50s who impetuously decides to buy a small house. This plot reminded me of one of my favourite novels “Ladder of Years” by Anne Tyler. It also feels like a kind of wish fulfilment as I've occasionally spent time online dreamily looking at shabby little houses in remote locations that I fantasize about spontaneously buying and moving into. In 2017 Samatha leaves her suburban house as well as her husband and teenage daughter because “What Sam wanted was not a safe house or an escape or even a sanctuary but, rather, a place to be alone, to do some time, to change herself. Whatever she was – the sum total of fifty-three years on the earth in this body – was insufficient to what would come next. She clearly had to change. The only certainty she felt was that she had done everything wrong.” The story hinges on the question: is she running away from her life or running towards it? But the book also gives a broad overview of current American and online culture from the point of view of an individual who feels like she's underrated by her own family and ignored by the larger society.

The house (which exists in a bad neighbourhood of Syracuse) doesn't play as central a role in the story as the premise might make it seem. There's little descriptive detail about her making the house her own beyond: “After the closing, she fixed the house enough for her to move in.” Instead, the story focuses more on the strained relationship she has with her family: her ill mother who won't confide in her about the nature of her illness, her emotionally-distant daughter who doesn't respond to her daily texts and her husband who still provides financial assistant (as well as the occasional booty call.) She also tests the water in making new connections with other women after her despair about Trump entering the White House. Samantha struggles with insomnia or 'The Mids' where she's wide awake in the middle of the night. She makes the perilous decision of spending a lot of time online where she meets some other women who've formed specialised private groups such as one called “The Hardcore Hags”. The individuals she meets feel similarly alienated from the lives and surroundings they've grown into. Though she initially joins in their venting and rebellious behaviour, she finds little of the community she really yearns for.

Rather than being a story about Samantha renovating a house to suit her new life, Spiotta considers the clash between our ideals and the reality of the homes we make for ourselves. Samantha works in a (mostly volunteer position) at a historic house once inhabited by Clara Loomis. This is a (fictional) 19th century figure once honoured as a social pioneer but now considered suspect for her views on race and religion. At one point late in the novel we get some letters from Loomis whose joy at joining a utopian community quickly sours. A man Samantha's daughter Ally becomes romantically involved with takes part in gentrifying a historic building. Samantha's mother Lily becomes reluctant to leave the idyllic house she's come to live in once she realises that her time is limited. Rather than being abodes we can rely upon as sources of comfort and community we've found ourselves psychologically hemmed in because of the state of our current culture – before we physically became housebound by the 2020 pandemic. Spiotta's novel presents a compelling point of view and contains more subtly than is immediately apparent. However, I found myself admiring what this book was trying to do rather than feeling fully invested in the story offered. 

Lullaby Beach by Stella Duffy

It's riveting reading a well-plotted, artfully constructed multigenerational story where there are long-held secrets. It's especially moving when the family clearly loves each other but still find it difficult to confess things that are destroying their lives. This is the case with the three generations of women portrayed in “Lullaby Beach”. The story begins when teenager Lucy goes to visit her great-aunt Kitty in her dilapidated seaside home and discovers she died from taking an overdose of pills. Over the course of the story Lucy's mother Beth and Sara seek out what really happened to this spirited, independent woman and why she chose to end her life in this way. Sections of the novel move back and forth between the decades to show that it's not only Kitty who was compelled to conceal the truth. Many secrets are gradually uncovered. The story compassionately shows how we can become entangled by circumstances and are driven by fear to make desperate decisions - especially when being coerced or cornered by domineering men. 

This novel portrays a particularly compelling sister relationship. Sara and Beth are quite different from each other. They have a strong bond, but feelings of competitiveness and jealousy underline a lot of their actions. Details such as the way Beth's daughter Lucy is naturally drawn to confiding in Sara over her mother show how family dynamics can grow to form inbuilt tensions. Duffy is also very good at building larger social issues into the specificity of her stories. She shows the way particular characters in different time periods are marginalized by overt or inbuilt racism. There's also a class system at play in the small seaside town at the centre of the novel. The longterm residents of this community are being systematically cut out of receiving the financial benefits from the redevelopment and rejuvenation of their surroundings.

But the central theme of this novel is the many ways women are silenced by shame. Though Kitty is an adventurous, forthright and intelligent individual she becomes stuck in an abusive relationship in which she's exploited. All too often society is quick to judge the victim from the outside and say a person being abused should just leave, but Duffy portrays the emotional, financial and social circumstances that can lead to the continuation of this painful situation. At one point Sara describes how “We get ashamed of something we think the world disapproves of, but shame's more about something we know ourselves is wrong. Or maybe it's something that's wrong in others and we feel it because of them, because of how they've been to us.” Stella Duffy's novel poignantly shows that this shame can lead to longterm secrets – especially with the people we love the most.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

I always feel some trepidation picking up a classic novel I know I should have read before – probably in my teenage years. Like “Frankenstein”, “Jane Eyre” and “Little Women” I've come to “Rebecca” relatively late in my life. I was already familiar with the story because I've seen the equally classic 1940 film of Du Maurier's novel directed by Alfred Hitchock. But, of course, the great thing about a classic novel is that no matter how much you feel you already know it because it's so much a part of our popular culture the actual experience of reading it for the first time is often surprising and delightful. To finally read that famous opening line “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” was to discover this story anew. I was instantly bewitched by the naïve young woman who finds that becoming a man's second wife means that she's entered into a love triangle with a ghost. Du Maurier evokes such an all-consuming and uneasy sense of atmosphere as she describes this unnamed narrator's introduction to becoming the new mistress of the grand estate of Manderley. From the memories of everyone who knew her, the routines of the household, the decoration of the rooms and the monogramed stationary, the presence of the late Mrs de Winter is everywhere felt. It's such a gripping and enlightening experience reading this novel for its mysteries and suspense, but also because its meaning can be interpreted in different ways. 

The narrator is so shy and meek it's impossible not to initially feel sympathetic towards her as she escapes a terrible job as a companion to the snobbish wannabe Mrs van Hopper by marrying Maxim de Winter. This romantic trajectory of a humble young woman entering into a relationship with a wealthy emotionally uptight man felt so reminiscent of “Jane Eyre”. It's no wonder the author Sarah Perry describes Maxim as “Mr Rochester at the wheel of a motor-car.” Like Mr Rochester, Maxim also has a secret about his previous marriage and, rather than being open and honest with his new wife, it takes dramatic events for the truth of the past to be revealed. Maxim's masculine arrogance certainly doesn't help the fundamental misunderstandings which occur in their relationship, but the narrator also concedes at one point how her own attitude creates a barrier between her and others: “I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered and continue to suffer because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.” Like many introverted people, she lets her imagination run wild, especially in regards to her assumptions about people and what she believes people think of her. Of course, she has a right to be suspicious as she overhears some servants and “friends” candid thoughts about her, but she constructs a false system of beliefs about her place in the household in a way which is psychologically masochistic.

More than the narrator, the most fascinating character in the novel is certainly Mrs Danvers. Du Maurier sets us against her from the very beginning or, at least, makes us fear her through the narrator's eyes as she's described in such creepy terms with her “skull's face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton's frame”. Her attitude and manner is so foreboding and stern Mrs Danvers is much more like a school mistress who must be appeased rather than a head servant who manages the household of Manderley. Yet, her maniacal loyalty to Rebecca, the first Mrs de Winter, and fierce care for her remaining things which she dusts every day reveals she has such enormous stores of unvoiced grief for this lost woman. It's hard not to interpret Mrs Danvers' feelings for Rebecca as romantic given her overriding obsession with her and the fact that she fondly looks through the drawers of her underwear. While you could interpret this as a negative representation of homosexuality, she also must be one of literature's great queer villains. As Carmen Maria Machado describes in her memoir, it's hard not to love a figure like this because she's so fabulous in her misery and unvoiced passion. But, even though Mrs Danvers is cunning and vengeful, she's also sympathetic when in rare moments of grief she weeps and mentally breaks down. It's no wonder that Mrs Danvers has taken on a life of her own inspiring tales like Rose Tremain's excellent short story 'The Housekeeper'.

It's also fascinating how Rebecca looms so large throughout the story like an ominous spectre – not least of all because her name is emblazoned on the novel's cover whereas the name of the narrator is never even mentioned. She was someone with a legendary charm and beauty and the narrator is clearly consumed with jealousy. Surely this speaks about her own insecurities rather than the perceived malice of this lost woman's spirit. Of course, we can never get Rebecca's point of view since she died before the start of the story. So we can only speculate about her identity based on second-hand accounts. If you see her through Mrs Danvers' eyes Rebecca is like an empowered short-haired feminist figure who has eschewed any need for a man. From Maxim's perspective she was a cunning, selfish nymphomaniac. And from Jack Favell's perspective she was a mischievous woman to be manipulated and used for his own purposes. Out of these subjective points of view emerges a dynamic character who will remain a figure of endless fascination. No doubt, both the narrator and Rebecca are characters that readers make different conclusions about every time they read this book which is partly why it's considered such a classic.

Though there's no question this novel is magnificent and I enjoyed it thoroughly, I don't think it's entirely perfect. The later part of the book is almost entirely consumed with unearthing whether Rebecca's death was a crime or not. We follow the machinations of this quest for justice in tedious detail as figures are drawn out one by one to provide testimony. Rather than in a courtroom this is pursued by tracking down an individual that is sketchily referred to in an appointment book. It all felt somewhat ludicrous to me as surely no firm conclusions could be drawn from whatever is found but the narrator's nerves are constantly frayed as she's certain some incriminating evidence will be revealed at every turn in the road. This was when my sympathy for the narrator waned and I felt more irritated by her. Overall, it just felt like a somewhat clunky way to reveal yet another hidden layer to Rebecca's character that none of the characters knew about and a too convenient way to get the main characters away from the house for a certain amount of time. Nevertheless, the mystery about Rebecca's true identity is so enticing I'm sure I'll come back to read this novel again and look for more clues. That Manderley ends in a great conflagration seems like the ultimate last word from Rebecca herself that she will ultimately remain unknowable.

Corregidora by Gayl Jones

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t come across Gayl Jones’ writing before learning about this new edition of “Corregidora” being reissued by Virago Modern Classics. It was originally published in 1975 with the help of Toni Morrison who was working as an editor at Random House at the time. Morrison famously stated “that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this” and the influence “Corregidora” had on Morrison is very evident. It certainly must have partly inspired her novel “Beloved” as Jones’ novel similarly shows how the past intrudes upon and shapes the present by invoking voices from earlier generations who suffered under slavery. 

“Corregidora” is the story of blues singer Ursa Corregidora. At the beginning of the novel she suffers a terrible injury after being thrown down the stairs by her jealous husband Mutt. The novel traces their tumultuous relationship over the years while Ursa recounts her early and later life. Interspersed throughout her story are accounts from previous generations of Corregidora women who can only relate the history of their difficult lives by talking to their daughters because physical records of their subjugation have been purposefully destroyed: “She said when they did away with slavery down there they burned all the slavery papers so it would be like they never had it.” Ursa carries the evidence of this past in the stories she’s received and she feels guilty that she can’t continue passing it on because she can’t have children. Both she and this novel are filled with the weight of history.

There’s a blunt honesty to Ursa’s story. I was frequently startled by the candour of the dialogue as well as the sex and violence portrayed. This is in sharp contrast to the figure of Ursa herself who is frequently passive and quiet – so much so that characters often chide her for being so listless. Yet this perfectly exhibits her crisis. Weighed down by the past and how it manifests in men’s attitudes towards her in the present makes her inert. The only way she can express how she’s really feeling is in song: “When do you sing the blues? Every time I ever want to cry, I sing the blues… What do blues do for you? It helps me to explain what I can’t explain.” Her music is the one thing she has that completely belongs to her when she feels the previous generations in her blood “we’re all consequences of something. Stained with another’s past as well as our own. Their past in my blood.” And her body and genitals are claimed as possessions by the men she’s with. Being so totally occupied she strives to achieve independence and her journey is artfully portrayed. 

Ursa is the embodiment of her family's past. So much so that they nearly become one another: “It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong.” This shows the way trauma can be carried and felt from one generation to the next. But Ursa is also her own woman and it's absorbing following the way she builds her own life and stays true to her music. The complexities of her uniquely powerful story are captured here with rare honesty and insight.

My reading experienced was informed and influenced by the particular copy I read. Since this is a novel about passing stories on, the publisher had the clever idea of passing a single proof copy amongst several readers to annotate and comment in it as they read along. My copy had notes from two different readers who underlined passages and wrote their thoughts in the margins. I appreciated the connections they made and the ideas they discussed next to the text. It made this quite a unique communal reading experience or maybe it reinforced how reading is both an individual and a communal experience. Anyway, it was an interesting way to experience the story.

I'm also so curious to know more about the author Gayl Jones now. She's still living but is reclusive, doesn't grant interviews and hasn't published anything new in twenty years. Her life has been incredibly dramatic including fleeing from the US for many years to escape a crime her husband committed and being involved in various protests. It's sombre to think her life has been troubled as that of her character in “Corregidora.”

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

I often feel hesitant to read stories about writers writing because it can feel like the biggest cliché for a novel to be about the act of writing a novel. Of course, as someone who mostly lives through fiction I will gladly overlook what might be an eyerolling self-referential act for the pleasure of being in close company of another book nerd. And this novel goes in depth discussing the creative endeavour, our relationship to reading and dozens of fascinating quotes and references to writers such as Nabokov, Svetlana Alexievich, J.M. Coetzee and the now more obscure J.R. Ackerley. It’s also a commentary on our society’s evolving relationship to literature and the challenges of teaching creative writing in the era of political correctness. But I was caught off guard by how emotionally moved I was by “The Friend” by the time I came to the end of it.

The plot revolves around an unnamed female writer whose lifelong friend and mentor (who was also a writer and creative writing teacher) commits suicide. He leaves her his dog, an enormous Great Dane named Apollo. It’s a challenge for her to keep the pet because she lives in a tiny rent-controlled NYC apartment which doesn’t allow dogs. But she refuses to part with Apollo because he serves as both a connection to her lost friend and a source of emotional support that she increasingly hurries home to spend time with. Although you only get fragmentary glimpses of the narrator’s life and experiences her story builds to form a picture of an isolated individual struggling with issues surrounding mortality, loneliness and self-expression. But she also makes many wry and humorous observations about human nature and social behaviour. All this cumulative detail builds to form an understanding of her state of being while making poignant reflections on the human condition.

Her position in relation to her friend who committed suicide is also unique. He was married three times. Although the narrator is not one of his widows they shared an uncommonly close relationship and his actual widows treat her with a mixture of friendship, contempt and rivalry. This is shown humorously but I like how it also highlights that there are many relationships in our lives which don’t fall into neat categories of either family or romantic partnership. Yet, when it comes to something as significant as death, our relationship to that person can be devalued because there wasn’t a social label to certify its significance.

There’s also a fascinating chapter which is like a creative writing exercise she might assign to her students. In it she imagines an encounter between a woman and man who aren’t dissimilar to herself and her friend. Their discussion strays into a description of a novel the woman is writing about her fictional account of the man committing suicide. It’s a clever way of juggling with what’s true and what’s fiction. This emphasizes her point: “It is curious how the act of writing leads to confession. Not that it doesn’t also lead to lying your head off.” But it’s no less meaningful when the narrator finally succeeds in keeping the dog and develops an abiding connection with him. What’s undeniably true is the feeling of intimacy that the narrator craves to cling to even after losing her closest friend.

Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen (translated by Anna Halagar)

No doubt Niviaq Korneliussen’s debut novel will catch many people’s eye for the novelty that its young author is from Greenland, but its real appeal and power resides in its diversity of assertive young voices. The narrative follows five different characters whose romantic and familial entanglements with each other produce moments of self-revelation and big life changes over a night of drinking and partying in the city of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “Crimson” is heavily inflected with Greenlandic and Danish language, references and culture, but its themes of young adults trying to come to terms with their gender and sexuality have a much more global outlook. The characters communicate with each other through Facebook and SMS text messages, sum up their moods in hashtags and search Google for answers to life’s questions. These are young people you could meet anywhere in the world. I found it poignant how the characters corner themselves into moments of intense self-reflection through these intensely private and confessional forms of electronic communication. In this virtual space they gradually sift through ways of being to discover who they really are and what they really want. By relating their different points of view in a finely-orchestrated succession, Korneliussen builds an engaging story with many revelations and forms a picture of a modern generation in microcosm.

This novel was first published in its native language with the title “Homo Sapienne” in 2014, but has now been translated into English. It’s just been published in the UK under the title “Crimson” but the American publication in January 2019 will publish it with the title “Last Night in Nuuk”. The UK title no doubt arose from the song ‘Crimson and Clover’ by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts which in the story plays in the bar on the night in question and is referenced several times throughout the text. The song’s dream-like quality and expression of spontaneous sensual intimacy amidst emotional confusion sums up the tone of the novel quite well. I’d have projected this book would take on a kind of cult status a generation ago, but it feels like its decidedly queer perspective will have a much more mainstream appeal today. I can imagine many kinds of young people relating to it and many mature people appreciating it. It’s not so much a novel that recognizably comes from a Nordic literary tradition, but from that of a new generation. It’s more in line with a novel such as “Conversations with Friends” by Sally Rooney which is an Irish novel that doesn’t carry many hallmarks which make it specifically Irish. There’s something exciting about an emerging literary movement which isn’t restrained by national borders and alights on common experiences mediated through the digital world.

The five different characters may share a kind of frenetic energy and express different forms of queer experience, but each voice is quite distinct in its timbre and point of view. The opening section is narrated by Fia whose rapid-fire train of thought sparks with intriguing moments of reflection: “I make up my mind because death won’t leave my mind. There has always been something missing here.” She finds it challenging to articulately sum up how her desire can be defined and instead humorously relates her abrupt break with her boyfriend by stating “My thoughts make no sense. I’m simply tired of sausages.” Fia’s brother Inuk wrestles more combatively with issues of sexuality and national identity to show how deeply ingrained traditions die hard.

Later in the novel, the character of Ivik is more assertive in volleying back society’s confusion so as not to limit how he’s defined: “I was an enigma to my friends. They didn’t know which box to put me in. When they began to question me, I began to question them. I began to question why they called me into question. My parents, siblings and family began to be uncertain about me. They were uncertain about who I was. Since my family were uncertain about me, I began to be uncertain about myself. I was uncertain about why they were uncertain about me.” I enjoy how this string of logic takes on a musical quality in its repetition of words. But it’s also really powerful in how it shows the inner dialogue which takes place in response to being made to feel like a social outcast or oddity. I found it especially striking how Korneliussen captures Ivik’s emotional confusion in how physical barriers arise from sexual contact.

When the novel arrives at the final perspective of Sara it’s striking how the story takes on a much more hopeful tone. Throughout “Crimson” the characters must naturally stumble through a lot of messy drunkenness and unwieldy sexual encounters to gain insight into their own motivations. Sara discovers profundity and solace in the pleasure of really knowing oneself: “Being alone isn’t all bad. It’s enough that somebody loves you and you love somebody. If you love yourself, you’re not lonely when you’re alone.” Korneliussen is a welcome new voice in global fiction not because of the specifics of her geography, but because she captures so perceptively and vividly the expansive heart of a new generation.

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

2018 marks the centenary of Muriel Spark's birth. It's been wonderful seeing how this event has reinvigorated interest in Spark’s books. Many people and organizations have marked the occasion from Ali of HeavenAli's year-long read-a-long #ReadingMuriel100 to Virago Press publishing a beautiful new edition of “Memento Mori” (that also celebrates this essential publisher's 40th anniversary) to Adam's video commemorating Spark's birthday (his booktube channel is even named after this Spark novel.) My own interest in Spark's fiction unfortunately stopped early on as I've only previously read “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, "The Driver's Seat" and “The Finishing School” in 2004, the year it was published. The later turned out to be her final novel and it sadly felt lacklustre and slight to me which is why I didn't pursue reading any more of her earlier books. But now, having read “Memento Mori” I feel doubly inspired to pursue her back catalogue. It's so brilliantly clever and funny with its large cast of idiosyncratic elderly characters who are continuously hounded by a mysterious caller that regularly reminds them “Remember you must die.” The story is perfectly drawn to capture the tragicomic condition of old age as well as the great challenge of facing our own mortality.

Despite the creepy anonymous reminder many characters continue to spend their few remaining years getting into petty arguments, changing their wills out of revenge, desperately trying to hide age-old affairs from their partner, scheming to inherit money, amassing stacks of pointless statistics, routinely reading horoscopes or fighting the care staff that try to assist them. There’s something deliciously pleasurable in reading about characters who have supposedly reached the height of maturity but who act out so petulantly. It’s like a rebellion against the social norms we’re all constricted by, but it also serves as an example of how getting older doesn’t necessarily mean we get any wiser. The magnificent characters in this novel can be as undone by jealousy, pride, greed, lust and gluttony as anyone under seventy.

It’s also an incredible how Spark writes about serious subjects such as the onset of dementia and the fear of poverty in old age, but the story remains light and funny throughout. She writes in a minimalist way which only gives just enough information and the right amount of dialogue to make the reader feel they know the character implicitly without weighing the narrative down in detail. Also, Spark employs repetition with the instincts of a stand-up comedian. The more we get to know the characters and their tiresome tics, the funnier they become because their face-slapping predictability is wickedly humorous. We can almost foresee when Godfrey will comment how someone has lost their faculties or how Alec Warner will insist on gathering pointless data or that Dame Lettie Colston will change her will as a ploy to get what she wants. Although Spark may take the piss out her characters, she also treats them with a lot of care and affection. So when some characters abruptly die the reader feels their loss quite sharply.

The story is also impressively layered. Details of the characters’ complicated pasts and their various entanglements, deceptions and secrets are carefully distributed throughout the narrative to create a larger picture of why they act the way they do in the present. All the while there is the peculiar mystery of the morbid caller who harasses so many of them which in itself becomes quite comical, especially when none of his victims can agree on what his voice sounds like. I was very moved by the way this novel says so much about the human condition while also being fantastically entertaining. It’s impressive that Spark wrote this when she was only forty years old. My experience of the book was also enhanced by reading the entire novel aloud to my boyfriend during a week-long road trip we took around Scotland. It felt appropriate to read this Scottish writer in her native country (even though the novel is actually set in England.) The narrative and dialogue really came to life in reading it this way and gave us plenty of laughs along the way.

A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert

Whenever I read a description of another new novel dealing with The Holocaust I feel a little twinge of uncertainty. Despite being one of the most horrific acts of genocide in the past century it’s a subject that’s been covered in countless novels. Is there anything new to say about this atrocity? Of course there is. Many novels from Audrey Magee’s “The Undertaking” to Ben Fergusson’s “The Spring of Kasper Meier” have proven this to me. But never has a novel I’ve read about this period of history felt more relevant and close-to-home than Rachel Seiffert’s new novel “A Boy in Winter.” I’m conscious that this has a lot to do with the current politics of our world, but I truly recognized in this story situations and patterns of behaviour that feel very near. Seiffert has fictionally dealt with this era before in her debut book “The Dark Room” which is composed of three novellas connected to the war and set in Germany. This new book is set in a small village in the Ukraine over a period of a few days in late 1941 when the Nazis come marching through “cleansing” the community of its Jewish population. It’s stunningly told and it’s a devastating story, but it also speaks so powerfully about the world we live in now.

Seiffert has the most unique and powerful way of conveying the inner sense of a character’s emotions using only external descriptions. It’s something she did so expertly in her previous novel “The Walk Home” (which was one of my favourite books of 2014) and she does it again in this new novel with an adolescent Jewish boy named Yankel. Different sections of the book focus on different characters, but the author doesn’t often shine a spotlight on Yankel. Instead, we get a sense of him through other characters such as his father who has been put in a hellish temporary holding cell by the Nazis or a young woman Yasia who takes in Yankel and his younger brother. We get descriptions of the way Yankel carries himself, his stance or the movement of his eyes, but even though the reader is not often keyed into what he’s thinking we get a real emotional understanding of him from the author’s evocative external descriptions. Seiffert does this in a way which is powerful and quite unique. The arc of his story and the semi-tragic transformation he goes through in order to survive is brilliantly told.

This is an incredibly beautiful and impactful novel, but a slight problem I had with it is an instance where a certain character who is conscripted into the Nazi forces leads the reader through the way that Jewish people were processed. There’s nothing wrong with Seiffert’s descriptions of these scenes and their impact is devastating, but it clearly felt like his character was being used simply as a device to show what the author wanted to show rather than what his character would naturally encounter. However, a striking thing about this section is the way she describes the Nazis basically forcing each other to drink while they conduct their brutal and horrific executions. It gave a powerful sense of the way many of these soldiers had to use alcohol to deaden their humanity in order to perform the atrocious duties they were ordered to perform.

The central question of this novel asks what you would do if you were faced with the choice of following the evil will of an oppressive government or being severely punished for refusing to participate. It prompts you to ask yourself what you would do if neutrality wasn’t an option. Seiffert shows the complexity of this question through a number of different characters including non-Jewish Ukranians and a German engineer who takes a remote position in the army because he wants to avoid this moral dilemma but finds himself forced to make a horrific choice. The lines between an individual’s right and wrong become blurred when they are forced to ask themselves: “where was the wrong in staying alive?” It’s a haunting question.

I read this novel as part of a mini-book group I’ve formed with the writers Antonia Honeywell and Claire Fuller. We discussed it over lunch and had a fascinating conversation, but it’s quite special in that it’s the first book (out of the three we’ve read together so far including “The Underground Railroad” and “Mothering Sunday”) that all three of us were overwhelmingly positive about. Antonia and Claire are astute critics so the fact they both liked this novel so much is high praise! Rachel Seiffert is an incredibly talented writer and I find her writing moving in a way that is hard to describe. But it’s safe to say I’d recommend that everyone should read this timely historical novel.

The Dark Circle by Linda Grant

I’ve had a copy of Linda Grant’s most recent novel “The Dark Circle” on my shelf since it was published in November, but for whatever reason I didn’t get to reading it despite being extremely moved by her previous novel “Upstairs at the Party.” So I was delighted to find it on the Baileys Prize shortlist as it gave me a great excuse to get it down and finally read it. Although this novel is very different from her previous one I was immediately drawn in by the eloquence of Grant’s prose with its excellent witty dialogue and vibrant characters. The story concerns a brother and sister (Lenny and Miriam) in 1950s London who contract tuberculosis. The city and social environment are vividly rendered where the continued deprivation of the war and effects of the bombings are still intensely felt. A very different scene is evoked when the pair are taken to a sanatorium in Kent which was once an exclusive facility for the privileged but it’s now taking in patients under the new national health care system. This creates an intermingling of people from all walks of life who are plagued by this illness and pining for a rumoured miracle cure. The result is a spectacular evocation of the passage of time and changing values through the lives of several fascinating characters.

The medical facility that's purportedly for recuperation feels like a truly stultifying environment. Patients are encouraged to be as inactive as possible to prevent themselves from getting too excited. They are prescribed to take in fresh, bracing air so many are set out on a veranda in the freezing cold weather. Most terrifying of all is an upper floor of children confined to their rooms and put in straight jackets if they become too active. Whilst purportedly giving their bodies a rest their minds rot from lack of stimulation. Yet, some of the patients form special connections based around interests like literature and music. There's a particularly forceful American character Arthur Persky who introduces an element of chaos into the strictly ordered facility. Gradually the stories of their particular backgrounds unfold amidst these interactions. New arrivals Lenny and Miriam are looked down upon as London working class Jewish people by some of the medical staff such as the terrifyingly named Dr. Limb. He feels that “the government had opened the door of the slums. It was difficult to be discerning about such an undifferentiated mass of humanity.” That there were such classist opinions about socialized health care in the early years of the system seems particularly striking when thinking about recent debates about funding for the NHS.

Miriam is a fan of films and movie stars. She particularly admires the beauty of Linda Darnell in 'Forever Amber'

One of the most poignant stories in the novel is about a mysterious German patient named Hannah. She's someone who survived the horrors of war and brutal confinement only to find herself trapped within another institution with a terminal illness. Luckily she has a lover named Sarah who works for the BBC and exerts her influence to get a preciously rare experimental drug to Hannah. This sets in motion a chain of events which puts governmental scrutiny on how the facility is run. It was surprising and wonderful to find a lesbian love story at the centre of this novel. This is handled really sensitively where both women show a savviness to live how they want despite the prejudices of the time. They have a steadfast faith that “the new reality would emerge. It wasn’t a dream.”

Grant has a fascinating way of writing a historical novel that is conscious of future developments. During the narrative she'll sometimes refer to future novels that will be written or events that are simultaneously happening elsewhere which the characters can't know anything about. This creates a compellingly rounded view of history and a hopeful tone for how civilization is progressing despite the provincial attitudes of some people in the institution. It also lays the groundwork for the later parts of the novel which skip forward into the future at a point where the horrors of tuberculosis have largely been forgotten. It's skilful how Grant does this while also faithfully and vividly rendering a feeling for the 1950s milieu with its misguided medical practices and rumblings of anti-semitic attitudes. Individuals are forced to take drastic action to help themselves in some really dramatic and arresting moments. Certain scenes are described so sharply that they are particularly memorable. For instance, the grim way Lenny and Miriam's father died is something that I'll never forget. “The Dark Circle” is a gripping and finely detailed story.

Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett

I enjoy it when novels clue me into fascinating new facts about the past. Shirley Barrett’s novel “Rush Oh!” takes place in the rural township of Eden in Australia. From a future point, Mary recounts the story of whaling season in the year 1908 so that her nephew can have a feeling for this defunct way of life. Her father George Davidson is a local hero as he leads whaling expeditions along the coast whenever they are spotted during their migration. What’s so interesting is that Barrett bases her story on a real arrangement where teams of men worked in conjunction with a group of local Killer whales. The Killer whales corralled blue, humpback or right whales into the bay so that the whalers could harpoon them. The Killer whales got to feast on the meat and the whalers took the rest of the carcass to use the blubber and bones. It’s a curious pact between men and beasts for a common cause. Barrett has brought to life a story about this rare arrangement which is filled with adventure and romance.

Mary is the eldest daughter of the Davidson family. She writes about the year 1908 because it was a time when the family’s fortunes began to turn since whales had become scarce. It’s also personally significant for her as that is when a strange former minister named John Beck comes to join the whale party and steals her heart. Having lost her mother many years ago it falls to her to organize the household and look after her younger brothers and sisters. Although I found the tales of the hunts for whales and details about the time period really engaging, something about Mary’s narration irritated me. She has what feels like a faux naivety and innocence that clashes with the brutal world around her. Her social awkwardness comes across as enduring and she has moments where she shows herself to be strong and capable. However, overall I found her mourning for her lost mother and romantic stirrings for John to be unconvincing. 

Skeleton of Killer whale that aided whalers in their hunts at the Eden Killer Whale Museum

It’s interesting how Mary turns the narrative into a kind of scrapbook including drawings she made of the whales and people involved as well as articles from the local newspaper. This combined with descriptions of the meagre food they ate and the arduous hunts for whales really brought the story to life. It's fascinating how the primary Killer whale Tom becomes a character himself with a distinct personality. There are also several excellent comic scenes in the novel including when Beck tries to deliver a sermon to whalers who won’t stop interrupting him or a gruesome tale of Uncle Aleck who submerges himself in a whale carcass as a cure for his rheumatism. But the narrative comes across as inconsistent when it follows the thoughts and feelings of men on the whaling expeditions which Mary wasn’t a part of and couldn’t have had any real knowledge of. She admits in certain scenes that “To be honest, I am not entirely sure if these were their exact words – I am reconstructing this conversation from an account given to me later by John Beck.” This a cumbersome way of getting around the fact that Barrett can’t show as much of the tale as she’d probably like to because the story is stuck in Mary’s perspective.

I couldn’t help comparing this novel to another book I read recently named “Elemental” which shares some striking parallels. “Elemental” is also the first person account of a woman recording her life’s story of working by the sea during the early 20th century. She’s recording this for a family member and the second half even takes place in Australia. Yet, there is tenderness and charm in the voice of “Elemental”’s narrator which I felt was lacking in Mary’s account in “Rush Oh!” I did enjoy the historical period and setting for this novel, but I wish Shirley Barrett had found another way or created a different character to get into the story.