Book Review: Inside Story by Martin Amis (England)

I have mixed feelings about Martin Amis’s writing. On the one hand, I find it insufferable – smug, sexist, self-congratulatory. On the other, he was a bombastic genius with words, writing surprising, witty and always inventive prose.

Inside Story is close to an autobiography, though Amis archly refers to the book as a novel, with the protagonist a man named Martin Amis, much of whose biographical information seems to match that of the writer Martin Amis (with a few half-hearted name changes).

A large part of the book concerns Amis’s close relationship with the writer, critic and cultural commentator Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011, and who haunts the pages. Amis also deals with the loss of his parents – and persistent fears that his father might have been not arch-philanderer, novelist and critic Kingsley Amis but miserabilist poet Philip Larkin. The book also lingers at length on the character Martin Amis’s affair with the emotionally damaged but never boring Phoebe Phelps, who may or may not be entirely fictional.

Mixing self-indulgence with profundity, I kept turning the pages, and no doubt I will return to Amis’s writing again (though I always think I won’t). This was book 6 of my 20 books of summer.

Book Review: Audition by Katie Kitamura (USA)

I read this short novel by the American author Katie Kitamura last month, before it was longlisted for the Booker. I’d enjoyed her acclaimed 2021 novel Intimacies, about a woman who becomes an interpreter at the international court in The Hague during the trial of an alleged war criminal from an unnamed country (reviewed by me here), and she’s an intriguing author.

Audition is divided into two distinct parts. In the first section a middle-aged actress is appearing in a Manhattan theatre production that is not quite coming together. Against this backdrop, with its associated tensions, she agrees to meet a good-looking young man, Xavier, a virtual stranger, for a meal; he is apparently fascinated by her, and she is acutely aware of how their meeting might appear to an outsider, or to her partner: that it might seem deeply inappropriate, that she might seem predatory. Then the young man suddenly suggests that he might be her son, though that is impossible she asserts, she’s never given birth.

In the second, apparently completely separate part of the novel an alternative reality pans out, as if reflected in a fairground mirror, in which Xavier now becomes part of her family, living with her and her partner as their son. (Whether he really is her son in this reality or instead is living with them as if he were is unclear.) When he brings a girlfriend into the flat, there is instant animosity between the actress and the young woman, and an uncomfortable tilt in the power dynamic of the household occurs. This second section has a chilling, hallucinatory aspect.

The style is a little reminiscent of Rachel Cusk, with the protagonist unnamed, somehow distanced, and Kitamura has a flat, often minimalistic style. Detail is tantalisingly lacking: the actress’s ethnicity is withheld, though it is crucial to the way she’s perceived by others in the story (“How many times had I been told how much it meant to some person or another, seeing someone who looked like me on the stage”). We’re not told what the play in which she’s performing is about. Identities shift disconcertingly, and it becomes difficult to know what is performance and what is reality.

It’s a short novel, and a quick read, which is why it found its way onto my 20 Books of Summer list as a late substitution (at number 5). I’m not surprised it’s been longlisted for the Booker, as it’s tricksy and intelligent, but it left me feeling a bit dissatisfied. The problem is I’m not entirely sure what point Kitamura was trying to make, and I’m not sure that what she has done works.

Book Review: Red Water by Jurica Pavicic (Croatia)

Translated by Matt Robinson

I tend to avoid crime novels and murder mysteries as I find the deaths upsetting, have an irrational hatred of puzzles and find the minutiae of police procedurals tedious. However, this novel was reviewed really positively in the Financial Times and was a recommended ‘book of summer’ in one of the Saturday broadsheets too, so I grabbed a copy to see what all the fuss was about.

Seventeen-year-old Silva goes missing within the first few pages, and the plot seems likely to fit the often misogynistic mould of these things. What’s interesting about this book though is its epic sweep, which takes in the collapse of the communism, the devasting 1990s wars, and Croatia’s subsequent embrace of capitalism and reliance on the tourism industry, even while its focus remains on the impact of Silva’s disappearance for her family and for the inhabitants of her small coastal hometown. Nor are the historical developments simply a colourful backdrop – they inevitably have a devastating impact on the ability of investigators to uncover what has become of Silva, and whether she’s alive or dead.

A proper page-turner, this was book #4 of my #20booksofsummer.

Book Review: The Possession by Annie Ernaux (France)

Published by Fitzcarraldo, and translated by Anna Moschovakis

Nobel Prize Winner Annie Ernaux writes fearlessly about her intimate relationships, stating in the opening to this book that “I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. To write as if I were about to die – no more judges. Even if it’s an illusion, perhaps, to believe that truth comes only by way of death”.

This book comes in at under 50 pages, so it was a handy choice for my 20 books of summer challenge. It details the half-insane period after the break-up of a sexual relationship during 2001. Ernaux became obsessed with the identity of the woman (an academic) who her ex has taken up with, to extent of trawling online university directories for likely names, and making late night phone calls to the apartment building where she decides she lives. It’s raw, disarmingly candid and strangely gripping. I’m behinf with my reviews as ever – this was book 3 of my #20booksofsummer.

Book Review: The Dragons, The Giant, The Women by Wayetu Moore (Liberia)

This is book 2 of my #20BooksofSummer. After a novel from The Gambia, I’m back in Africa with a memoir by the Liberian writer Wayetu Moore. And this is another three-parter, opening when the author is five. She lives with her father Gus, an academic, her two young sisters and her grandparents, and life is generally good, bar the glaring absence of her mother, away for a year having been offered a prestigious academic scholarship in New York. Then war breaks out at home in Liberia, and although Gus tries to shield the children from its brutal realities with elaborate fairy tale-like fictions, he can’t prevent the truth from forcing its way through.

The second part of the book telescopes time, and far from Moore’s childhood we are suddenly transported to the USA, where she is now a young adult, having emerged from the Texan education system an apparently successful and attractive woman, albeit a woman who rages internally at the racial injustices she encounters, and is plagued by nightmares of the war. Ultimately she pledges to return to Liberia, where her parents have also returned, in an effort to confront her demons.

Finally, in the third part of the book we switch perspectives, as this is written in the first person voice of Moore’s mother, during the desperate year that she is separated from her husband and children during the conflict, and chronicles her odyssey to find them and take them to safety in the USA with the help of a female member of the rebel militia.

The book was longlisted in the USA for the Carnegie medal for excellence in nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Book Review: Reading the Ceiling by Dayo Forster (The Gambia)

Dayo Forster was born and raised in The Gambia, before moving to London to study economics. I came across her 2007 book Reading the Ceiling for 99p on Kindle, and the premise intrigued me – I have a weakness for narratives about different life courses, and those sliding doors moments when everything hinges on a seemingly inconsequential decision. This is book 1 of my #20BooksofSummer.

The novel’s heroine Ayodele is about to finish school for university … and is desperate to lose her virginity first. Her list of possible lovers comprises Reuben (the ‘safe’ option), her schoolfriend Yuan, and Frederick, who is (queasily for me) the 40-something father of her best friend. This three-part novel imagines three alternative futures for Ayodele, each new trajectory resulting from her choice of lover, and shaping the path of her life and the development of her character as she either pursues a globe-trotting future (encompassing time in the UK, the USA, Mali and Senegal) or remains in her home country of The Gambia.

I happened upon a blog by the author – no longer updated, in which she notes that her decision to write the book came from a chance remark from a friend: “How do you think your life would have been different if you had stayed in The Gambia?”

She continues: “I drew up a tree, which I vaguely based on Boolean logic, of a choice that could only have two outcomes. Then I devised a series of choices and picked out episodes in a life of a created character, Ayodele, which would meander to each choice and, sometimes be linked to another chapter further on … As I shifted the focus to story telling, only a third of the original draft stayed … and the elaborate mathematical structure receded in the background.”

This was a deceptively drinkable novel that provided some interesting insights into life in The Gambia. I just would have liked Ayodele to have had less trauma in getting to the right choice! (Though it may have made the book less interesting.)

20 Books of Summer 2025

So, after many years of hosting the popular 20 Books of Summer challenge, Cathy of 746books has handed over the reins to Annabel at Annabookbel and Emma at Words and Peace. I don’t participate in many challenges, but I do really love this one, partly because it runs over a long period, three months, which means I can always manage to rack up at least some reading and posting without the timer running down without me having had a chance to take part!

I also love choosing my selections, and here’s my 2025 list, with publishers’ short summaries. At least half of these have been chosen to progress my ongoing project based around experiencing a wide range of culture from around the world:

  1. The Possession by Annie Ernaux: ‘The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city – the whole world – with a person you may never have met.’ A striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Newly published in English.

2. Red Water by Jurica Pavicic: ‘1989 The Dalmatian coast. The investigation into a young woman’s disappearance falters as Yugoslavia plunges into civil war. Another three decades will pass before the truth is revealed. Inspector Gorki Šain, haunted by his failure to unravel the case the first time, returns to solve the crime in 2017’. I’m not keen on crime fiction , but this new paperback was reviewed well in the FT.

3. Eurotrash by Christian Kracht: Longlisted for the International Booker, and due to be returned to the library. “Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his eighty-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past.”

4. The Ultimate Tragedy by Abdulai Sila: also due back at the library – the first novel from Guinea-Bissau to be translated into English, “a tale of love and emerging political awareness in an Africa beginning to challenge Portuguese colonial rule.”

5. Looking for Transwonderland by Noo Saro Wiwa: another library loan – “Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England but spent her childhood summers in Nigeria – a country she considered an unglamorous parallel universe, devoid of all creature comforts. After her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was murdered there in 1995, Noo rarely returned to the land of her birth. More than a decade later, she decided to come to terms with Nigeria. From the exuberant chaos of Lagos, to the calm beauty of the eastern mountains; the eccentricity of a Nigerian dog show to the empty Transwonderland Amusement Park, Noo combines travelogue with an exploration of corruption, identity and religion.”

6. Inside Story by Martin Amis: A ‘novel’ about the life of novelist Martin Amis, his friendship with Christopher Hitchens, his relationships, etc.

7. The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kis: A counter-prophet attempts the impossible to prove his power; a girl sees the hideous fate of her sisters and father in a mirror bought from a gypsy; the death of a prostitute causes an unanticipated uprising; and the lives of every ordinary person since 1789 are recreated in the almighty Encyclopedia of the Dead.

8. The Greek Anthology: “A comprehensive collection of Greek poems written between the seventh century B.C. and the tenth century A.D.”

9. The Trial by Franz Kafka: “A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis–an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life–including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door–becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.”

10. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis: “A wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion and the decisions we make in pursuit of belonging.”

11. Rites of Passage by Judith Flanders: “Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving, to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying. This is an engrossing, deeply researched and, at times, chilling social history of a period plagued by infant death, poverty, disease, and unprecedented change. In elegant, often witty prose, Flanders brings the Victorian way of death vividly to life.”

12. The Dragons, The Giant, The Women by Wayetu Moore: back to the library with this one, “An engrossing memoir of escaping the First Liberian Civil War and building a life in the United States.”

13. Mission London by Alek Popov: I saw this on another list, but I can’t remember whose! “The new Bulgarian ambassador to London is determined to satisfy the whims of his bosses at all costs. Putting himself at the mercy of a shady PR-agency, he is promised direct access to the very highest social circles. Meanwhile, on the lower levels of the embassy, things are not as they should be. With criminal gangs operating in the kitchens, police on the trail of missing ducks from Richmond Park and a sexy Princess Diana impersonator employed as the cleaner, how is an ambassador supposed to do his job? Combining the themes of corruption, confusion and outright incompetence, Popov masterly brings together the multiple plot lines in a sumptuous carnival of frenzy and futile vanity, allowing the illusions and delusions of the post-communist society to be reflected in their glorious absurdity!” Might be terrible?

14. Reading the Ceiling by Dayo Forster: Set in The Gambia, “Ayodele has just turned eighteen and has decided, having now reached womanhood, that the time is right to lose her virginity. She’s drawn up a shortlist: Reuben, the failsafe; an, a long-admired schoolfriend; Frederick Adams, the 42-year-old, soon-to-be-pot-bellied father of her best friend. What she doesn’t know is that her choice of suitor will have a drastic effect on the rest of her life. Three men. Three paths.”

15. How to End a Story – Collected Diaries by Helen Garner: this has been very recently published and near-universally praised. “Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Now she is widely recognised as one of the greatest writers of our age. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best. Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.”

16. Notes to John by Joan Didion: I guess I have to confess to a mawkish curiosity here. “In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had ‘a rough few years’. She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.”

17. Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent by Mircea Eliade: “The short-sighted adolescent is a poor schoolboy who is in love with literature, and tries to emulate the lives and works of the writers he most admires. He is also fascinated by science and history, and stays up all night reading. At the age of 17 he decides to write a novel to prove to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his fellow pupils, and is prepared to give up everything in order to do so. The novel is written in a series of notebooks – the ‘diary’ of the title … From the perspective of a schoolboy’s diary of everyday life in Bucharest in the early 20th century, – his teachers, his classmates’ academic and amorous rivalries, his first sexual experiences – we are introduced to the themes of religion, self-knowledge, erotic sensibility, artistic creation and otherness, subjects that would preoccupy Mircea Eliade, one of Romania’s most prominent intellectuals, until the end of his life.”

18. The Scapegoat – The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett: “From the winner of the Bailie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.”

19. The Fig Tree by Goran Vojnovic: “The Fig Tree is a multigenerational family saga, a tour de force spanning three generations from the mid-20th century through the Balkans wars of the 90s until present day.”

20. My Country, Africa -Autobiography of the Black Passionaria: “Andrée Blouin — once called the most dangerous woman in Africa — played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and ’60s, advising the postcolonial leaders of Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and Ghana. In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary.”

If falling behind I reserve the right to swap in: audio books consumed as part of my monthly Audible sub, a Kindle read (these are read exclusively in bed, and therefore very slowly, as I fall asleep after the equivalent of about three pages – but I might possibly get through one in three months) and my two summer book club reads (to be decided imminently at a forthcoming meeting).

Film Review: Flow (Latvia)

Latvian movie Flow (2024) is extraordinarily beautiful. Directed by Gints Zilbalodis the CG movie has no dialogue, but is punctuated by frequent, very authentic-sounding miaows from a little black cat, sometimes fearful, sometimes curious, who, as the film opens, is struggling for survival amid an unexplained, apparently apocalyptic flood. The appealing, wide-eyed cat boards a boat, which also picks up a cute capybara, a fairly dopey Golden Retriever and a ring-tailed lemur. As it drifts through the ruins of an environment devoid of humans, but dotted with intriguing cat statues and from which remnants of civilization, such as an abandoned city, sometimes emerge, the animals’ characters become clearer, although this is no Madagascar-esque escapade, and there is not a hint of kitsch.

Flow won the Golden Globe for best animated picture and took away the Oscar for best animated feature earlier this year, as well as being nominated in the category of best international feature. A statue of the cat has even been been erected in the Latvian capital Riga (see top of post).

Book Review: The Night Circus and Other Stories by Ursula Kovalyk (Slovakia)

Translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood

After another brief hiatus due to non-stop work and no days off for the last three weeks, I’m back to catch up on some reviews.

This is a quickie: one I’ve had on the shelves for a few years, published in 2019 and picked up in a secondhand bookshop. Less than 100 pages in length, and containing 16 short stories, it seemed a good choice for a period when I could only spend bitesize chunks of time reading.

Ursula Kovalyk is a Bratislava-based poet, playwright and social worker as well as a writer of fiction, and I have often enjoyed novels written by poets, perhaps because they tend towards vivid imagery. I found these surreal, feminist stories a bit challenging though … or shall we say incomprehensible.

Although the New Welsh Review has asserted that “at their best, [the stories] read like Angela Carter’s ‘Bloody Chamber’ for the Fleabag age“, I feel this may be doing both Fleabag and Angela Carter a disservice. The European Literature Network is quoted on the jacket as describing Kovalyk’s work as “riotous, funny and painful”, and there was absurdism here (which I generally like), but overall this collection wasn’t for me.

I’m keen to champion writing from Central and South-Eastern Europe, so I’ll be continuing to read around the region, and if anyone has anything they’d particularly recommend, do please let me know!

March 2025 Round-Up and Plans for April

I’m very glad to be in April, with longer days and blossom on the trees, although it is always a hectic month for me professionally.

During March I had a weekend with friends in sunny Scarborough, which is such a beautiful seaside town, and a weekend at my mum’s in Lincolnshire, as well as a couple of gallery trips to see the Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern and a trip to the small Courtauld Gallery to see the Goya to Impressionism show. I also finally tried the Persian restaurant Persepolis in Peckham, whose chef has written a series of cookbooks.

I finished eight books from my TBR stacks in April, most memorably David Szalay’s new book Flesh, which I reviewed a week or two ago, and for me is a five-starrer. The others, in brief:

Limonov by Emmanuel Carriere: Novelistic biography of the controversial Russian writer and dissident Eduard Limonov by the well-regarded French writer. Key takeaway: What a horrible man he was! ***

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico: Italian longlister for this year’s international Booker, published by Fitzcarraldo. Satirical notes on the lives of cosmopolitan late-capitalist millennials. ***

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart: Possibly the most depressing book I have read in recent months, on lives blighted by alcoholism in 1980s Glasgow. Not for the faint-hearted. Definitely avoiding his work from now on, sorry! *

Orbital by Samantha Harvey: Booker-winning novella about astronauts. Sometimes astounding and life-affirming, at other points, dare I say it, a bit turgid. Wasn’t sad when it finished. ***

The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy: I didn’t realize when I asked for this as a birthday present that it was a mix of re-potted journalism and book introductions, sometimes surprisingly banal given the absolute excellence of her earlier ‘living autobiography’ non-fiction trilogy. **

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan: Winner of the 2024 Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction. Part reflection on family history and growing up in Tasmania, part trauma memoir recounting a near-fatal accident, part history of the development of the nuclear ‘deterrent’ along with digressions on the impact of H. G. Wells on the bombing of Hiroshima… A great book. ****

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It’s certainly imaginative. **

I’m trying to restrain book-spending, and I have a new ‘two off-one on’ rule for my TBR, so with eight books read, the four additions are:

Cat Sense by John Bradshaw – secondhand buy, on understanding cats!

The Trial by Franz Kafka – secondhand classic, it’s about time I read Kafka.

The Greek Islands by Lawrence Durrell – mother’s day present

Cats on Film by Anne Billson – mother’s day present

And finally, at the cinema I saw Mickey 17 with my youngest daughter (great Trump-inspired characterization by Mark Ruffalo, playing deranged space colonist Kenneth Marshall), and randomly, late at night with mum during my visit, schlock-horror 2022 US cannibal movie Fresh, starring the UK’s Daisy Edgar Jones, of Normal People fame.