Book review: Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (Ireland)

This is book 3 of my 20 books of summer 2023, which runs from 1 June until 1 September (I have read more, but am behind in writing them up!).

This is the first novel I’ve ever read that has captured the sense of having one’s whole identity destroyed and rebuilt that is surely ubiquitous after becoming a mother. Irish novelist Claire Kilroy captures the rawness and heightened emotions of early motherhood, the loneliness of maternity leave, the feral, pure animal protectiveness that kicks in, the annihilating exhaustion and the desperation that comes with a total loss of autonomy. Kilroy smashes every taboo. I would have fallen on this book when I was a mother to a young baby, and even from a distance of over decade since my last I found it hugely resonant.

My first baby cried a lot. I loved her desperately, and love her desperately now too! But I could hard relate to the futile despair of the narrator [known only as Soldier] after closing the door behind her work-bound husband: “Seven thirty-five. Thirteen more hours to go” until the beginning of the blessed bedtime routine.

At home with a baby, slave to that baby’s demands, life shrinks in on itself. Babies do not, as I had imagined, lie mutely and adoringly in a basket at our feet. They rage and pound their fists, and their demands are near-constant, and sleep a rare commodity, likely to be snatched away at any time.

The setting of the book is those almost solely female places that men may never encounter directly: heaving playgrounds, cold coffee in overcrowded mum and baby caffs, music groups in grim dusty halls, the rest of the world “an adult place from which I’d been rejected”.

The book is also a polemic, with the enormous load shouldered by women, both mental and physical, being juxtaposed with Soldier’s interactions with her apparently oblivious husband.

As Doris Lessing wrote: “I haven’t yet met a woman who isn’t bitterly rebellious, wanting children, but resenting them because of the way we are cribbed cabined and confined.”

There’s isn’t a huge amount of plot, but there is a long section where the narrator runs into an old male friend in the playground. Their encounters hum with lost opportunity but also a recognition that they have moved into a new stage of life. When Soldier sees a high-heeled young woman passing the playground she notes with regret that it’s time for that woman to have “her turn on the swing”. Later though, when her friend describes his heightened awareness of the mutability of life and the beauty of the changing seasons since spending so much time with small children, that sense of loss is countered by the recognition that you are a long time dead and there is a need to savour your “turn on the swing” while you have it, and that with parenthood, and even simply in having your life, you have been given just that.

Amid everything, the book is often extremely funny too, and Kilroy has a flamboyant and incisive turn of phrase: describing removing her baby from his buggy to take him into the mother and baby group, she writes: “I unstrapped my prize marrow”, which made me laugh out loud.

I saw a male reviewer mention that the protagonist in this novel goes insane – I would argue she goes no more insane than many other first-time mothers, and that that reviewer’s sense of amused disbelief simply highlights the disconnect between male and female experiences of parenting. The book’s success testifies to the unspoken universality of its theme.

Finally, as an aside, being a fellow Bowie fan I really liked the protagonist’s obvious hero worship of him – with even Sailor, the name used throughout to refer to her infant son, a famous pseudonym of Bowie’s.

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna (Finnish book of the month)

Translated by Herbert Lomas

Book 2 of my 20 books of summer, after Megan Abbott’s The Turnout, is this Finnish modern classic by Arto Paasilinna (first published in 1975, and published in English translation in 1995). I’ve accumulated quite a pile of Finnish fiction, which I’m intending to work through at a rate of one a month!

Kaarlo Vatanen lives in Helsinksi, where he works in the world of newspaper reporting, living a desultory life, drinking too much and enduring a failing marriage.

One day the car that he is travelling in with a colleague hits a hare, and he goes off to investigate. Losing patience, the colleague drives off, leaving Vatanen alone in a rural forest area with the injured hare. When his conscience eventually begins to bother him the colleague returns to the scene, but Vatanen is nowhere to be seen.

Vatanen has splinted the hare’s broken hind leg, and made off with it on foot, and what follows is an blackly comic boys’ own rural road trip. It would make a great road movie, and apparently HAS made a great road movie, but I suspect the book might appeal more to a male readership than it did to me. Vatanen flees the metropolitan media world of Helsinki for manual labour, sex with milkmaids, tackling forest fires and hunting bears, while bonding with the many eccentrics he meets along the way. Accompanied by his furry and increasingly loyal friend, he does liberating things like felling pines and setting up bivouacs.

The book was amusing in parts, and contains a visual gag involving a bear that is better than anything in Cocaine Bear (yes, I’ve watched it). The book tackles serious themes with an admirably light touch, and Vatanen’s relationship with the hare is genuinely endearing. None of the female characters would pass the Bechdel test though, and I was never fully engaged in the action. It is not a bad book, as its enduring popularity, modern classic status and translation into many languages attests, but it wasn’t really for me.

Book review: The Turnout by Megan Abbott (USA)

This is book 1 of my 20 books of summer (a challenge organized each year by Cathy), and is one of the books that I chose at random off the first shelf at my local library, in the hope of finding a hidden gem. I have read one of Megan Abbott’s books before though: the earlier Dare Me was an overheated and page-turning book focusing around alpha females and cheer-leading rivalries. It resonated at the time of reading, as I’d inadvertently found myself in a sort of highly charged middle-aged Zumba cult, which meant I looked hotter than I’d looked since my 20s, but, on the downside, was REALLY WEIRD (especially looking back on it now, safely rehabilitated from the over-heated world of ageing mean girls – and quite a lot heavier).

Moving swiftly on. The world of ballet seems to lend itself to feverish plotting (think excellent but bonkers movie Black Swan), and The Turnout is claustrophobic and faintly hysterical from the start. It concerns two adult sisters, Dara and Maria, who have grown up as dancers in a socially isolated, ballet-orientated family, and who have inherited their mother’s dance studio following their parents’ deaths in a car accident.

There are strong Gothic vibes. The girls (“the same but different”) grew up in a large crumbling house, where Dara still lives with her preternaturally beautiful husband Charlie (all cheekbones, blond gracefulness and ancient Greek musculature). Charlie is a former dancer who is battling chronic pain from dancing injuries while working as business manager at the studio, and who spent his formative teenage years living with the two sisters and their parents. The three feel uncomfortably enmeshed, while the prose is cloying and sensuous.

Charlie and the two sisters have kept themselves largely isolated from others, and Dara’s crisp manner with students and parents at the by now very successful studio does not invite intimacy. However, when they hire a contractor to carry out renovation works on their creaking studio his influence begins to dial up the tension, against a background of hormone-driven adolescent rivalries amid preparations for the studio’s annual Nutcracker.

When things come to a head, what had been quite a page-turner lost momentum for me, and I found Abbott’s tendency to tell not show impinged on my enjoyment: it meant I didn’t miss anything, but sometimes I might have preferred the challenge of an intellectual leap. And there were way too many fires.

(Book 1 of my 20 books of summer)

My 20 Books of Summer 2023

Here’s my summer reading list, now I’m all set up to take part again in Cathy’s annual 20 books of summer challenge.

My first three selections were inspired by reading The Shelf, a 2014 book by Phyllis Rose subtitled Adventures in Extreme Reading. I’ve been much-derided for enjoying this book by my children – reading is hardly bass-jumping – but the premise really appeals to me. Rose went to the New York state library, and picked a shelf (almost) at random, pledging to read her way through it. The book was a fascinating exploration of the results of this exercise, and took her away from reading directed by reviews, hype and the canon.

So, off I went to Dulwich Library in South London, and picked up 3 random books off the very first shelf, comprising authors from ABB to ALL.

I know next to nothing about these books, and have previously read only one of the authors (Megan Abbott’s Dare Me).

  • 1, A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi
  • 2, The Turnout by Megan Abbott
  • 3, Things that Fall from the Sky by Selja Ahava

The following five books have effectively been selected in the opposite fashion and by diktat, from books on my TBR that are included on the unofficial canon, the 1001 books to read before you die list. So we have:

  • 4, London Fields by Martin Amis (I read and loved the hilariously repugnant Money)
  • 5, The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
  • 6, Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev
  • 7, Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  • 8, The Life of Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair
  • 9, I’m Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti
  • 10, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Then five hardbacks, mostly recent, to help clear my teetering piles of over-sized books:

  • 11, Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
  • 12, French Braid by Anne Tyler
  • 13, All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley
  • 14, A House for Alice by Diana Evans

Then five random books from my TBR:

  • 15, Bolla by Pajtim Statovci
  • 16, The Bitch by Pilar Quintana
  • 17, The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (for book club)
  • 18, Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas
  • 19, While we were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer (for book club)
  • 20, Purge by Sofi Oksanen (bought on Kindle in 2011!)

Total: roughly 5,643 pages, which means reading 60 pages a day throughout June, July and August and posting every four days(ish), allowing for trips away. No mean feat, as the summer months are gruelling workwise. Eight books here are from the library, one on Kindle (so missing from the pic!) and the remainder are books I’ve bought or been given.

Here’s the stack of books, glowering at the end of the bed (note I’ve edited the selection slightly, mid-challenge):

Book review: Pyre by Perumal Murugan (India)

Translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

First published in 2013, and published in English in 2022, Pyre was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker prize, and selected by my small book club as our most recent choice.

The book can be read as a Gothic love story or folk horror, focusing on an intense but impossible 1980s relationship between a young Indian couple, the beautiful and trusting Saroja, and the naive and utterly captivated Kumaresan. The plot is focused around the intricacies and corrupting injustices of the Indian caste system, and it unfurls with all the tension and sense of inevitability of a South Asian Wicker Man.

Saroja is a fish out of water when she arrives in her new husband’s home village. He is of a different caste, and his family, notably his dreadful, keening mother, are unwilling to accept a girl who is so different from themselves into the fold: her skin is pale, her hands look like they’ve never done a minute’s hard work, and her constitution is far from robust.

Having grown up in the familiar village, Kumaresan is certain that these people he has known all his life will accept his wife once presented with the fact of their inter-caste marriage, but he has under-estimated the resentment and prejudice of the people he thought he understood.

The prose is clean, sharp and to the point, and this is an absorbing and powerful, if bleak, short novel.

Interestingly, the author has spoken of his own experience of being ostracised after the publication of his earlier novel Madhorubhagan in 2010, which was later translated from Tamil by Penguin and published as One Part Woman.

The subject of that book is a poor, childless couple, desperate to become pregnant, and the novel references an ancient Hindu ritual which permitted (according to anecdotal oral history) women struggling to conceive to partner up with unfamiliar men on a single night.

When, following its appearance in English, the book’s content came to the attention of right-wing Hindu and caste-based groups the backlash was intense. Amid violent threats Murugan withdrew the book from sale, and announced his own ‘death’ as a writer on social media: “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself. He has no faith in rebirth. As an ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone.”

At this point Pyre had already been written (the English translation followed years later). Still, despite the author’s metaphorical death more work is likely to be produced. The International Booker website notes that in 2016 a judge ruled: “Let the author be resurrected to do what he is best at. Write.” Thankfully, Murugan has apparently taken that as an instruction – ‘a command and a benediction’. 

Book review: History. A Mess. by Sigrun Palsdottir (Iceland)

Transated by Lytton Smith

This newly re-published book (February 2023) was sent to me for review by the people at Peirene. I’ve long admired the USP of Peirene, a small publisher of contemporary, high-quality European novellas in translation. Unfortunately, our house is being renovated at great length, and I lost the book in the boxes and rubble for a while, but it eventually resurfaced for a photo.

First published in Icelandic in 2016 (and in an English translation elsewhere in 2019), the story revolves around a PhD candidate researching the life and work of an obscure artist, who believes she has stumbled upon a mind-blowing revelation in the course of her historical research.

When it dawns on her, however, that in her haste to draw professionally-useful conclusions she has made a fatal error, her working premise implodes. She enters an all-consuming spiral of denial, shame and paranoia.

The book’s style is not always easy, and the translation perhaps wasn’t as smooth as it could have been, and all in all I didn’t love it until the denouement, which is absolutely brilliant and made the whole read worthwhile.

At times reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic 1892 novella The Yellow Wallpaper, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking account of academic accountability and mental distress. It provides an enjoyably chilling frisson of fiction-driven anxiety for anyone who has ever dedicated way too much of their time to researches in the vaults of a dusty library, or whose living relies on accuracy and meticulous fact-checking.

Book review: A Guide to the Serbian Mentality by Momo Kapor (Serbia)

(Multiple translators)

A slightly strange one this, which was recommended as a good read on Serbia in the Lonely Planet’s Armchair Explorer book (which I’ve currently lost amid the chaos caused by our building work, but hope eventually to unearth).

The title made me wince a bit, but this is a non-fiction book that is a mixture of national pride, self-deprecation and black humour, written and illustrated by Serbian novelist and artist Momo Kapor (1937-2010), and seemingly always intended for an English-speaking readership.

Unapologetically reinforcing as many stereotypes as it debunks, the book is interesting on food and culture, often witty, and sometimes gratingly sexist:

“things have changed … especially the Belgrade girl. She is no longer a somewhat plump little woman, whose appeal was in being unprotected and helpless … Today’s Belgrade girls are marked by an often slender, tall figure… [man in late 60s then waxes lyrical about hot young girls]”

He contrasts the lifestyles of grey-suited Western Europeans, working all the time without a drop of fun, with the Serbian business person, who intersperses (he says) the work day with a substantial breakfast, beers, grape brandy, and a nap. (The workers here are naturally male.)

I suspect there is quite a lot of exaggeration here for comic effect, and that times have changed quite a lot even since 2006 when the book was first published (only a few years after the NATO bombing of Belgrade, and only a decade after the end of the huge Balkan conflict, after all). My copy is the 2010 8th edition, but it seems to be out of print now.

Given that my work means I’m up to date with Balkan politics, and less so with Balkan culture, for me this book was worth a read. I suspect it has quite niche appeal for anyone else though!

Book review: Standing Heavy by Gauz (Côte d’Ivoire)

Translated by Frank Wynne

My reviews are not coming thick and fast at the moment: we’re having major building work at home and have the contents of our kitchen in our living room, and no other useable rooms for the five of us than the three bedrooms. This is a tad disruptive to say the least, especially while trying to perform a full-time, work-from-home role.

I have, though, managed to read this short, snappy book, by Ivorian writer Gauz (the nom de plume of Patrick Armand-Gbaka Brede), which has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Published in English in 2022, it was first published in French in 2014 under the title Debout-Payé.

Written from the perspective of migrant workers working as security guards in Paris between the 1970s and the 2010s, large sections of the book comprise satirical vignettes focused around the customers of a swanky store, as well as observations on the status of security personnel. This one made its point with an instantly recognizable image, since I spent my student year living in France virtually subsisting on the processed French cheese spread Laughing Cow:

THE LAUGHING COW

Needless to say, there are slightly more demanding jobs in security. The retail security guard is to the security industry what ‘The Laughing Cow’ is to cheese.

And then comes the impact of 9/11, and suddenly it becomes infinitely more difficult for economic migrants to find work in France:

“any employer will want to go through our paperwork with a fine-tooth comb before they allow us to stand in front of a fucking billboard.”

Overall, this is a quick read, and a witty but hard-hitting look at the realities of post-colonialism and capitalism in late 20th century/early 21st century Paris.

I’m not sure how much of the rest of the longlist I will get to, but I have to read Perumal Murugan’s Pyre for my book club, so that might be next.

Book review: Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle (Ireland)

Fierce Appetites: Lessons from my year of untamed thinking is a collection of personal essays by Irish medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle. Sub-(sub-)titled Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in My Present and in the Writings of the Past, the book was published in 2022 by Penguin, and (appropriately enough) I’ve read it during Cathy‘s Reading Ireland month ’23

Part memoir and part deep-dive into medieval Irish poetry, it meditates on the interconnectedness of time and place, and describes a year in Boyle’s life, the pandemic year of 2020, which opens with her father’s death in January.

“My brother poured seventeen sachets of sugar into his black coffee. I muttered to him, ‘If dad dies while you’re adding all these fucking sugars I will never speak to you again.’

We walked back to the ward. Dad had died…”

There are 12 chapters, broken down by month, containing personal meditations on 12 topics, such as grief, motherhood, travel, lockdown, nature and time, and interspersed with quotes from, and analysis of medieval poetry and history. She finds connections, parallels and contrasts with the past as she passes through that weird, pre-vaccine COVID year, a year in which she turns 40. In that birthday chapter, situated in August 2020, she quotes from a female-perspective medieval poem on ageing:

Ebb-tide comes to me, as to the sea.

Old age yellows me.

Though I may grieve at that.

It approaches its food gleefully.

I am Bui, the veiled woman of Beare.

I used to wear an ever-new tunic.

Today, attenuated as I am,

I have not even a cast-off tunic.

From here, in the same chapter, she notes that an ex told her that during arguments she would always come up with some ‘bullshit narrative’ to justify herself; she quotes James Baldwin (“the only real concern of the artist … is to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art“), adding that “this includes turning emotional chaos into bullshit narrative, to justify myself to myself, if not to you.”). Next she turns to the world of academe: “Academic hands tear texts apart in a hungry search for something that might pre-date Christianity; pre-date literacy. Stripping away words after word until there is nothing left but unspoken ideology. Bullshit narratives.”

Segueing between loosely connected topics like this could go wrong in less assured hands, but I found it all fascinating. And although the subject matters sounds erudite – and it is – the writing is also no-nonsense and sometimes very funny.

Boyle can be uncomfortably open, acknowledging upfront that she is an alcoholic from a family of addicts, and questioning her motives for her leaving her six-year old daughter in England with her father to pursue her academic career many miles away in Ireland. The rare but eyebrow-lifting accounts of her sex life are such that the Daily Mail would probably wheel out terms like “shameless”. And amid the confessional writing, she is clear-eyed, incredibly clever, emotionally raw and extremely good company.

“When I was very little, no more than three or four years old, I had already moved house so often, amidst so many permutations of my shifting family unit, that I told my stepmother that I didn’t know where my home was. She told me that my home would always be wherever my teddy bear was.

…

Today, Poodle lives in my bedroom in Dublin. He has a hole in his arse from when one of my brothers anally raped him with a pencil. His head has been sewn back on twice, badly, and sometimes stuffing falls out of his neck. But he is home.”

Book review: The Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins (Canada)

This work of non-fiction by Canadian journalist Matthieu Aikins, published in 2022 by the always interesting Fitzcarraldo and sub-titled An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees, has been described as a work of “radical empathy”.

Aikins was living comfortably in Afghanistan (this was in 2016 and well before the recent Taliban takeover), when his friend and ‘fixer’/interpreter Omar decided to try to migrate to the West. Aikins, with a mixed Japanese-Canadian heritage and knowledge of Persian and Dari that meant he could ‘pass’ as a fellow Afghan refugee, decided to accompany him on the often perilous illegal migration route to Greece, crossing the Mediterranean in an inflatable dinghy.

Obviously Aikins had less to lose than his companion, who left behind his family and his girlfriend for an uncertain outcome. Although Aikins faced threats to his safety in pursuing the illicit migration route, his Canadian citizenship meant that he had the privilege of being able to call time on the endeavour if it got too much. This aspect of the experiment made me think of David Rosenhan’s 1973 study On Being Sane in Insane Places, which I read for my psychology degree: the radical act of infiltrating a place (a mental institution vs a refugee camp) and a state of existence surely only the most desperate or foolhardy would choose.

Aikins pretends to know no English, adopts the name Habib and even sends his passport to a friend. But whereas Omar is effectively imprisoned in the refugee camp on Lesbos in which the find themselves, Aikins always had the option of calling in his passport. This is an important and absolutely fascinating book, in revealing the horrors of the migrant trail, while the contrast between Aikins’ experience and Omar’s utter lack of a safety net really magnifies the vulnerabilities of desperate migrants left at the mercy of often hostile governments.