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A very quick review of The Echoes, which was book 10 of my 20 books of summer, and probably my favourite read of the summer so far. It’s written by Evie Wyld, who was named one of the Best of Young British Writers by Granta in 2013.
The Echoes has only just come out, and I wasted no time in plunging into it, with an immediately engaging narrative that weaves in and out of different time frames: ‘Before’, ‘After’ and ‘Then’.
It opens ‘After’ with the voice of Max, hitherto a creative writing tutor, and now a ghost who is rather reluctantly haunting the South London flat where he lived until his death with his Australian girlfriend Hannah:
“I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem.”
Hannah has been emotionally scarred by events that took place during her childhood back home, which she has kept from Max, and the narrative spools back in time to both her life on a goat farm with her rural Australian family and to the time that follows her move to London, where she met and moved in with Max.
It is an intelligent, literary novel, and one that is a bit experimental and high-concept, but it’s also a really pacy page-turner, and I loved every minute I spent reading this book. I’m not big on gritty these days, and there are some shocking revelations both about Hannah’s family history and the dark history of the place where she was raised, and where terrible abuse was visited on the Aboriginal population. However, this is counter-balanced by the very contemporary, natural dialogue, and a strong undercurrent of humour (including a fantastic set piece involving Christmas with Max’s dreadful parents) in the sections set in South London. And I loved that I could recognise the locations in the sections set in London, where I live.
This 1995 novel, which is book 9 of my 20 books of summer, feels like it should be much older, if only because it seems to been on my radar forever.
The book follows some 30 years in the life of a man called Michael Berg, who recalls his sexual involvement with Hanna, a woman more than twice his age, when he was just 15. It is an intense, stormy and uneven relationship that for a time utterly consumes Michael, although he has normal teenage interests too, and when Hanna mysteriously leaves town he seems to come to terms with both the ‘affair’ and her abandonment of it.
“When I see a woman of thirty-six today, I find her young. But when I see a boy of fifteen, I see a child.”
Years later, while studying law, Michael unexpectedly encounters Hanna at a Nazi war crimes trial where she is appearing as a defendant, accused of terrible crimes while guarding Jewish prisoners. Michael is naturally engrossed by the trial but also confused by some of Hanna’s behaviour during it, as she seems to act counter to her own interests. It dawns on Michael that Hanna has another secret that she is determined to conceal.
As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Michael’s entanglement with Hanna as a teenager has impacted his whole life – and Hanna’s, and they remain distantly connected. His marriage fails, his relationship with his daughter seems distant, and he struggles to reconcile his erotic teenage memories with his knowledge of Hanna’s actions during the War.
The Reader deals with big themes of guilt, accountability, abuse and deprivation, but is written in deceptively simple prose, like a young adult novel. I wondered if it was aimed at teenagers, but its themes seemed very adult.
An unexpectedly large proportion of the books I read deal with issues around the Second World War, presumably because it was such a massive event in the 20th century that its themes continue to dominate ‘serious’ literature. I also seem to be reading an unsavoury amount of fiction about under-age illicit relationships – I read and review Duras’s The Lover only last month.
Himself a lawyer and a judge, Schlink’s writing questions not only Hanna’s actions, but also the response to those actions by others, and what humans in general are capable of doing – or not doing.
This is book 8 of my 20 books of summer, which I finished a couple of weeks ago but have taken a while to write up.
The New Life is a 2023 debut novel that has been raved about in the press. It’s set in the buttoned-up Victorian era (I love a Victorian pastiche), and based on real events. John is a married, upper middle-class gay man, who by necessity lives with his wife and three daughters in a closeted and sexless marriage and a permanent state of sexual frustration as he lusts after the men he sees around the streets of London.
He eventually becomes attached to a younger, very good-looking and rather dapper man who is from a different social class. John falls for him hard, to the extent that he risks moving him into his home as his unlikely ‘secretary’, much to his wife Catherine’s mortification.
Henry, meanwhile, is a shy, straight man with embarrassing sexual foibles that are not easily satisfied (he likes – or needs – to watch women pee), and he seeks a life that separates the institution of marriage from the act of sex. He ends up living (not entirely willingly) with a lesbian wife who openly romances a female friend.
Henry and John collaborate on a academic work entitled ‘Sexual Inversion’ (based on a real 1897 book), which seeks to normalize atypical sexual feeling, specifically homosexual desire (‘inversion’ in the parlance of the time). Unfortunately, however, the publication of their book, which contains confessional accounts by gay men (albeit mostly using euphemistic Greek terminology), coincides with the infamous Oscar Wilde trial, and therefore puts both their careers and their positions in society at risk.
After all the fanfare I found the book good, but not that good. The character I was most moved by was possibly Catherine, as she ended up with nothing but wasted decades and the occasional borderline rape incident (at those times when John’s state of repressed horn got too much for him and he would ‘take her’ in a frenzy). Catherine’s life, as John’s, was ruined by her marriage. But whereas John, for all his longstanding frustrations, as a member of the patriarchy had the agency and financial freedom that ultimately enabled him to indulge his desires and build a life moulded around erotic pleasure and sexual obsession, she was simply missold a husband and left to grow increasingly lonely and embittered.
There’s lots of vividly described sex in this novel, and with its Victorian setting it reminded me of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. That was more fun, though The New Life has some important social points to make..
This is book 7 of my 20 books of summer. Marguerite Duras was born in 1914 and this, her most famous novel, won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 (and was also made into a film). She died in Paris in 1996, when French Prime Minister Alain Juppé described her as “a great writer whose magnificent and disturbing style … turned contemporary world literature upside down.”
I guess this classic work would now be considered some breed of autofiction. It concerns a 15-year-old French girl living in the 1930s in what was then French Indochina and is now, I think, Vietnam. She dresses eccentrically but provocatively and catches the attention of a wealthy local man in his late 20s, with whom she starts a sexual relationship.
“I’m wearing a dress of real silk, but it’s threadbare, almost transparent. It used to belong to my mother [..] This particular day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels […]It’s not the shoes though that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it’s the fact that she’s wearing a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon.”
Although the book principally concerns the protagonist’s coming of age in Asia, it roams backwards and forwards in time, to the deaths of the girls’ brothers, the later death of her disillusioned mother home in France, then back to Asia. Indeed it opens when the girl is much older, a ‘ravaged’ older woman, before spooling back in time:
“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
No one expresses much overt concern about the teenager’s relationship with the older, local man (though today I suppose he would be charged with statutory rape). She is candid in her enjoyment of the sensual side of the relationship (and this, really, is all their relationship boils down to).
The girl lives with her mother, who lives in a depressive state of genteel poverty, and her two brothers, one of whom is a violent sociopath, who monopolizes the mother’s attention and resources, and gambles away any money. In contrast, the younger brother seems to be a more vulnerable character. Although all three family members essentially no doubt disapprove of the relationship, they also benefit from it, so do not openlyy protest, while the girl seems cut-adrift, but at the same time inappropriately worldly in her assessment of her situation in life.
Ultimately though it is not the plot but the dreamy, melancholy prose and the vivid imagery, conjuring the smells and sounds and heat of Asia, that makes this short novel so wonderful. I really enjoyed this one, much more than I expected to.
This was book 6 of my 20 books of summer, and not a favourite. I work with many Indian colleagues so I’m interested in learning more about the country and the culture, but I didn’t enjoy this book, which won the Booker in 2008, and which had been languishing on my Kindle for about 13 years.
The book’s protagonist is Balram Halwai, who moves from a background of deep poverty to a life as a successful entrepreneur. The book is organized as a series of letters to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in which Halwai gives his rags to riches story, and his advice for getting to the top in business.
India has certainly become a big part of the capitalist business model, both as a source of cheaper labour for Western corporates, and also in its own right. But this particular story is in no way heart-warming. As Halwai notes: “Only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed … can break out of the coop.”
Halwai’s caste, background and name mean that he would have been expected to live as a simple sweet-maker in the ‘Darkness’, the rural, under-developed area of India in which he was born – and where he left his family behind in poverty.
As his employers in the ‘Light’ of the big city attempt to exploit him, Halwai turns the tables, ultimately building a business empire (of sorts) from scratch, although he has been morally and ethically ruined on the way up.
This is book that deals with serious themes, with an attempt to lighten the darkness with humour along the way. I didn’t find it funny, but it is described as a comic novel – just one that wasn’t for me!
This is book 5 of my 20 books of summer, and I went into it with few expectations. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. I expected to be slightly irritated, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
But I love a travelogue, and this 2006 memoir is a three-location, year-long adventure, covering author Liz Gilbert’s immersion first in the beautiful language, interesting sights and delicious food of Italy, followed by time finding peace at a retreat in India and finally finding balance on a sojourn in Bali as she attempts to get over a shattering divorce and the break up of an intense rebound relationship back home in the US.
Although Gilbert is a candid, genuinely charming and often funny guide, I sometimes found her utter self-absorption quite alienating. I feel most of us don’t have time to sift through the minutiae of our lives like this, picking up and examining every last feeling at length, though at the time of writing this book Gilbert was much younger than I am now – perhaps I’d have found it a more relatable read before I got married, and before I became middle-aged and frazzled. She is entirely free from ties, and therefore free to indulge in a LOT of self-discovery. She also clearly has a strong religious faith which I can’t/don’t share, so again I found I was reading, happily absorbed, and suddenly thrown by an account of an experience that I was unable to relate to (and it’s a book I think that is aiming for relatability), and which seemed suddenly to make life and its challenges over-simplistic (in that ‘everything happens for a reason’ way). Her adventures seemed to pan out swimmingly for her too, with lovely people everywhere she went, so sometimes I wondered if she’d been a little economical with the truth in order to give the book its pleasing structure and abundance of warmth (I don’t want to sound too cynical but surely not EVERYONE was utterly delightful all the time!).
The book has been hugely influential: indeed there’s whole book available entitled ‘Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It’, comprising the life-affirming accounts of people who read the book and were inspired to make changes in their own lives, and I’ve learnt that the book was also made into a movie, which I’d be happy to watch.
Overall I would recommend this book. It’s probably a bit of a girlie read, so might not appeal to most male readers so much, but I was mostly interested, entertained and mildly inspired. Although I could have done without the ableist language: her use of terms like ‘spastic’ and ‘spazzy’ made me wince.
“…London is a city of shadows, a city made for shadows. For people like me who can be here a lifetime yet remain as invisible as ghosts…”
Finally catching up on my summer reviews, this is review 4 of my 20 books of summer.
I have read everything Hisham Matar has had published, and reserved My Friends from the library as soon as it came out early this year. It’s a coming of age tale of sorts, part set in 1970s and 1980s Libya and partly in the same country post-Qaddafi, but mainly in the flats and streets of London.
Khaled travels to Edinburgh from Libya to study at university. He has had an affectionate and in some ways privileged childhood with his loving middle-class family, although paranoia has been ever present, in a country where disappearances are frequent and phone lines habitually bugged by the political regime.
Nevertheless Khaled is still young and a little naive, and has more of a sense of invulnerability while living in the UK, until his Libyan uni friend Mustafa persuades him to travel with him to London to attend a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy, in an episode that is based on the embassy shooting of 1984, when police woman Yvonne Fletcher was shot and killed by Libyan embassy staff. Both Khaled and Mustafa are caught up with the events of that day, ending up hospitalized with serious injuries. And, even more significantly, too terrified of the political repercussions for themselves and their families to return home or even let them know what has happened.
This part of the book is the best-realized and the most affecting, as Khaled must deal with the immediate aftermath of the events, and figure out a way forward. The immensity of the schism between past and present, familial comfort and estranged loneliness are stark, and brilliantly captured in propulsive and very beautiful prose.
Khaled also forms a close friendship with another Libyan political exile, Hosam, a writer, and their lives remain intertwined until the Arab Spring of 2011 when they must decide whether their fates remain in the UK or back in their long-abandoned homeland.
Exile, return and loss are recurrent themes in Matar’s writing: his much-lauded non-fiction work The Return dealt with the disappearance of his father into one of Qaddafi’s prisons and his return to Libya to try to uncover what happened to him. As Matar wrote in his work A Month in Siena: “He was imprisoned, and gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish“.
I very much enjoyed this incredibly poignant novel, although it was long (at around 450 pages) and flagged a little in places. I’d be willing to bet it will be on the Booker longlist next week.
I’ve got a weakness for books about dislocation and people making their way in new environments (maybe its some kind of trauma-induced interest from a year teaching in France with bad spoken French and no training when I was a student!).
Having specialized in Balkan and West African politics for years in my work, I’m also fascinated by the malign charisma of dictators (see also my post on Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs). Add into the mix the fact that the protagonist of this novel has just lost her father and I thought I was onto a winner.
The unnamed narrator of Intimacies arrives in The Hague from New York, a young woman with a year’s contract at (what must be) the international criminal court, with “native fluency in English and Japanese from my parents, and in French from a childhood in Paris”, to work as an interpreter. She’s anchorless and restless after the death of her father, and her mother’s subsequent move to Singapore.
She seems to have little firm sense of personal identity. She makes a few friends in a random, drifting way, and she falls into a relationship with a separated man whose flat still retains his wife’s spectral presence. She stays in this sleek anonymous flat while he travels to Portugal either to finalize his divorce or to try to make up with his wife – he certainly doesn’t clarify over the weeks of his absence. Other people call the shots – she seems to lack any agency. Even her work is strangely intangible, as she finds herself so caught up in interpreting the real-time testimony that the big-picture meaning and emotional import flows over and around her but never hits home.
She is called upon to interpret for a West African President accused of the usual clutch of horrific war crimes, and the author is insightful in describing the flimsiness of his hauteur:
“His gaze moved to the public gallery, which was also emptying. … His shoulders slumped and he suddenly appeared much older, I realized it must have taken him a great effort to appear before the court with his posture so erect, his bearing still presidential, to marshal what charisma remained, because contrary to popular belief, charisma was not inherent but had to be constantly reinforced.”
As the narrator drifts through her life in The Hague, accepting and somehow alone, even when with her refined friends or her sometime boyfriend, the tone reminded me of Sebald’s Austerlistz and Cusk’s Outline trilogy. She is weirdly malleable compared with the various powerful men who seem to dictate the path of her life in the Hague: the (surely guilty) President and his total lack of moral accountability, her sometime boyfriend Adriaan, who seems to call all the shots, and creepy criminal lawyer Kell.
“I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.”
This was a frustrating novel at times, which fell slightly short I think of its intention. But it was an unexpected page-turner: often fascinating, sometimes thrilling, always intelligent, and very beautifully written.
This is book 2 of my 20 books of summer, a short work of non-fiction that I liked less than I thought I would. Gillian Rose died of cancer in her late 40s, and the book is pretty much packaged as a cancer memoir, but it’s much more wide-ranging than that.
The book does cover the author’s devastating cancer treatment in some detail, and also discusses others’ battles with illness and difficulty, including a moving description of her friend Jim’s death from AIDS at the height of the crisis in the USA.
I can’t not mention a passage found elsewhere in the book, in which the author witnesses what I would consider an episode of serious child abuse by an acquaintance called Yvette against her own three-year-old grandson. This is described without judgment and entirely couched in Freudian theory. I found this startling and upsetting.
I did like this quote from Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, which Rose cites:
In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman – it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely the desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so. Every life is interesting, if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting … Man likes to enter into another existence … he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification…”
I also liked Rose’s exhortation against, effectively, over-solicitous helicopter parenting, of which I have definitely been guilty (in fact a couple of months ago my mum quipped “Is that the sound of rotor blades” when I asked my teenager about her homework):
The child who is able to explore that border [between fantasy and actuality] will feel safe in experiencing violent, emotional conflict, and will acquire compassion for other people. The child who is locked away from aggressive experiment and play will be left terrified and paralysed by its emotions, unable to release or face them, for they may destroy the world and himself or herself. The censor aggravates the syndrome she seeks to alleviate; she seeks to rub out in others the border which has been effaced inside herself.”
Rose was a professor in modern European philosophy, and social and political thought at the University of Warwick, and her fierce – in fact intimidating – intellect is in evidence throughout this book. Indeed, her style is quite off-putting for the general reader, as the book is littered with academic jargon (something I spend a good part of my professional life editing out of content). In fact for a book that has some very personal topics as its subject matter, it is surprisingly adept at warding off the reader. Rose would definitely have been the sort of person to discuss Hegel over drinks. And who wants that!
First published in 1995, I read the new 2024 edition that has been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a new introduction by Madeleine Pulman-Jones.
Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. The feeling I have when reading her novels and works of memoir in translation is the same as I had when reading Deborah Levy’s trilogy of living autobiography (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate – the link clicks through to my review): I find the work relatable at times, very easy to digest, yet highly literary and brimming with intelligence. I’m quite sure Levy will have read Ernaux’s books.
The always interesting and stylishly-jacketed Fitzcarraldo publications have published translations of much of Ernaux’s work over the last few years. I was very nearly put off it though, after starting with The Years, first in the original French (hard!), then in English translation (by Alison L. Strayer). It was beautifully written but intensely impersonal: it is essentially a social history of 20th century France and a work of collective autobiography, and brilliant no doubt, but I yearn for the personal, through an engagement with character, whether fictionalized or not. Though Ernaux nails universal truths in The Years, and puts them so eloquently:
“everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. … In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”
Second, early this year, just after dad had died of late stage Parkinsons, with no speech and consumed by dementia, and while my mother-in-law continued to fade into the fog of Alzheimers, I read I Remain in Darkness (translated by Tanya Leslie). This is a short book written in journal form and covering Ernaux’s frail mother’s decline into dementia, and her own feelings of ambivalence, guilt and devastation. I took screenshots at the time of passages that resonated with me:
“I often dream of her, picturing her the way she was before her illness. She is alive and yet she has been dead. When I wake up, for a few moments I am certain that she is still living in this dual form, at once dead and alive, like those characters in Greek mythology whose souls have been ferried twice across the River Styx.”
Finally, I’ve just finished Simple Passion, which is so short that I finished it in a day, and which deals with sexual obsession, detailing in obsessive detail a lightly fictionalized woman’s affair with a married, and therefore mostly unavailable, man. The times when they are together are barely touched upon. Instead, she describes the empty stretches of time between meetings, when, as she goes through the motions of everyday life, her attention is focused myopically on the moment when she can see him again. She resents leaving the house in case the phone rings, when she buys clothes it is with his appreciation in mind, when she buys groceries she buys extras, almonds, whisky, that he enjoys.
It feels confessional, and indeed Ernaux’s work Getting Lost is based on the same relationship and takes the formal of a journal, kept by Ernaux during her clandestine love affair with a married attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. As she writes towards the end of Simple Passion:
“The prospect of publication brings me closer to people’s judgment and the ‘normal’ values of society. (Having to answer questions such as ‘is it autobiography?’ and having to justify this or that may have stopped many books from seeing the light of day, except in the form of a novel, which succeeds in saving appearances.)”
At just 48 pages in length, Simple Passion distils experience into its most concentrated form and dissects in fascinating close-up the vicissitudes of all-consuming joy and pain brought by a doomed affair, and I devoured it virtually in one sitting. A good start to this year’s summer reading.
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