Anne Michaels, Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, England, Estonia, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Held’ by Anne Michaels

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Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 226 pages; 2023.

I loved Anne Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, a poignant story of a young Polish boy orphaned during the Second World War who must begin his life afresh but is haunted by events of the past.

The Canadian writer’s latest novel, Held, published last year, shares similar themes. It examines the long arm of trauma and war on an intergenerational cast of characters.

It’s a deeply contemplative story, told mainly in vignette form. It features multiple timelines, locations and characters and doesn’t follow the conventional structure of a novel.

As a result, Held is difficult to get a handle on — and almost three weeks after reading it, not much has stuck with me. It’s too ephemeral and too disjointed to be truly memorable. Yet I relished the gorgeous, image-rich prose and lush use of language, and thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience.

Century-long narrative

The story spans more than 100 years, moving backwards and forwards between 1902 and 2025, and takes in diverse locations, including North Yorkshire, Suffolk, France and Estonia.

It’s divided into 12 brief chapters, each focused on a specific time and set of characters. Most of the characters are related to each other in ways that aren’t always immediately obvious and often feel a bit cryptic.

This gives rise to a hazy, almost dream-like quality to the story, which is held together by recurring themes — love, war, faith, art and science — and motifs, including snow, ghosts, photographs and battlefields.

It begins strongly with the tale of John, a wounded soldier returning from the battlefields of France, morphs into an eerie ghost story of sorts, and then jumps ahead by 31 years to tell us how his widow, Helena, has reinvented herself after his death.

In later chapters, we are introduced to Helena’s daughter and granddaughter, both doctors whose careers take them to conflict zones, but it feels quite discombobulating when the narrative spools back to 1908 and focuses on New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and Polish-French physicist Marie Curie. When the narrative shifts again, this time to Estonia to follow a couple on the run from tyranny, I lost track of who was who and what was what.

Canadian edition, published by McClelland & Stewart

Exquisite writing

And yet, the exquisite writing compelled me to keep reading:

Her evening dress, morpho-blue, small glass buttons glinting, hung from the wrought-iron chandelier, floating in the dimness like a ghost, or a fish in aquarium light. He remembered her inside that glimmering skin of silken light. Then slowly he noticed other things, ordinary details, domestic objects, as if rousing from a dream: the cramped kitchen with its dirty white stove, a plywood table, a faded upholstered chair, a bookcase, a wood and brass metronome. (page 172)

I also appreciated the novel’s focus on duality — that is, the coexistence of opposites, such as light and dark or good and evil, within a unified whole. (As an aside, John Banville’s work also focuses on duality, so I’m attuned to noticing it.) This is a good example:

He knew Mara had always thought love made things complicated, but Peter knew love was a sharp blade slicing an apple: cleaved — both blade and bond. (page 107)

Or this:

Everything, he thought, is dualistic, nothing is alone: the snow growing brighter only as dusk deepens. (page 19)

And this:

And astatine, the rarest element, reminded Alan of something else: that the mechanism that disproves something is also the very mechanism of proof, and what we do not believe teaches us what we do believe. Faith is a mechanism, just as love is, proving itself, once and for all and again and again, by its disappearance. (page 146)

Impressionistic story

I think it’s fair to say that Held is an impressionistic story rather than an explicit one, which is fine if you want to revel in beautiful, poetic language but frustrating if you prefer a strong plot.

Personally, I can’t quite decide how I feel about this book. I adored the prose and the poetic arrangement of words on the page, and I loved the thematic explorations (again, quite reminiscent of John Banville’s work) and the use of recurring motifs. However, the structure baffled me, and I found the connections between characters too confusing. Make of that what you will.

Held has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The winner will be named on 12 November.

Aharon Appelfeld, Austria, Book review, Fiction, holocaust, literary fiction, Penguin Classic, Publisher, Setting

‘Badenheim 1939’ by Aharon Appelfeld (translated by Dalya Bilu)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin Classics; 148 pages; 2005. Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.

Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, first published in 1980, is regarded as a classic of Holocaust fiction.

It’s written in a simple allegorical style, which relies on the reader knowing the historical context and recognising the growing signs of impending disaster, even as the characters remain oblivious to their fate.

It makes for a short, powerful read because you know how the story will end.

Festival in the forest

As the title suggests, the novella is set in a small Austrian resort town not far from Vienna during the period leading up to the Second World War.

The story focuses on a group of Jewish holidaymakers who gather there every summer to enjoy a cultural festival put on by the eccentric impresario Dr Pappenheim. The festival attracts artists and well-to-do people, all staying in the same hotel, and largely revolves around classical music performances.

But in 1939, the festival’s atmosphere takes on a decidedly ominous air when the authorities impose restrictions on Jewish residents, requiring them to register their names with the Sanitation Department for resettlement in Poland.

The ever-cheerful Dr Pappenheim downplays the seriousness of the impending deportation, suggesting that the resettlement is merely a bureaucratic process and that Poland will be a welcoming place for Jews. He’s keen to ensure the festival program goes ahead with as little interruption as possible.

And so the holidaymakers take his reassurances to heart and continue to go about their usual routines with little thought to the changing circumstances around them. It’s not until local businesses — the Post Office and pharmacy — shut down and the gates to the town are closed that anyone questions what might be going on.

And life changed its course: no more forests, walks, picnics, spontaneous or organised excursions. Life was now confined to the hotel, the pastry shop and the swimming pool. (page 39)

Holding area

As the summer proceeds, the hotel transitions from an upmarket desirable place to stay to a more confined, almost prison-like setting, where the characters await their fate.

The food begins to run out, people spend all their time in the bar and for at least one person — a waitress — it all becomes too much. She slashes her leg with a butcher’s knife in front of everyone, shaking her audience out of their complacency if only for a moment.

As more and more Jews arrive from other parts of Austria, the hotel becomes a holding area before deportation. The book ends with everyone marching to a nearby train station where “an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars” arrives to collect them.

Powerful allegory 

The most intriguing aspect of Badenheim 1939 is how the author writes about a historical event without going into specifics or putting anything into context. The word “deportation” or “resettlement” is not used. Hitler is not named. Appelfeld is writing it with the benefit of knowing how events unfold, but for the residents, there is no such perspective because they are simply going about their daily lives.

The story is rich in metaphors. For instance, the fish blindly swimming in circles in the hotel aquarium symbolise the ways in which the hotel residents continue with their usual routines. The eventual demise of the fish represents the approaching catastrophe for their human counterparts.

At its most basic level, the novel portrays how ordinary people respond to an escalating crisis, showing a community’s inability to grasp the full gravity of their situation until it is too late.

Or as Gabriel Josipvici writes in the introduction, “the book gives us a sense that history has simply caught them [the characters]  in its trap” (page xiv).

Aharon Appelfeld (1932-2018) was a Holocaust survivor. He was deported to a concentration camp when he was eight years old, but escaped soon after and spent three years living in the forests of Ukraine before being rescued by the Russian Army.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Hisham Matar, Libya, literary fiction, London, Penguin, Publisher, Setting

‘My Friends’ by Hisham Matar

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 461 pages; 2024.

I was disappointed that Hisham Matar’s My Friends didn’t make the shortlist for the 2024 Book Prize for which it had been longlisted.

I loved this deeply immersive novel. It is a beautiful ode to friendship and literature and a compelling examination of what it is to be an exile, unable to return to your homeland for fear of persecution.

Accidental exile

It’s written from the perspective of Khaled, a Libyan exile living in London, who waves off an old friend, a writer called Hosam, at King’s Cross station. Returning on foot to the same West London flat he has lived in for 32 years, he reminisces about the importance of this long friendship, his friendship with another Libyyan, Mustafa, and the pivotal events that shaped all their lives.

From these flashbacks, we learn that 18-year-old Khaled came to the UK to study literature at the University of Edinburgh, but a spur-of-the-moment trip to London with Mustafa changed his life in ways he could never have foreseen.

While innocently attending a peaceful protest outside the Libyan embassy in St. James’s Square, both young men are seriously wounded when someone inside the embassy opens fire on the demonstrators in broad daylight. (The event is based on the 1984 Libyan embassy siege in which WPC Yvonne Fletcher was fatally shot and led to a major diplomatic standoff between the UK and Libya.)

The protesters were opposing the rule of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (particularly his regime’s human rights abuses and support for terrorism), which means Khaled and Mustafa are now marked men: they can never return to their homeland while Gaddafi remains in power and even letting their families know they have been at the protest puts them in danger.

Opportunities that had once been available to me — qualifying for a scholarship, getting a respectable job, securing a bank loan and, most crucially, being able to live as a free man — were now uncertain. (page 141)

For years, Khaled has to lie to his parents back home, spinning a convincing story about why he’s now living in London and simply too busy to return to Libya to visit them. Much of the novel examines how this heartbreaking experience influences his relationships and career.

Finding solace

Beyond his friendships, it is literature and a love of language that offer him comfort and a steady presence in his life.

Many writers and books are referenced throughout (see the lists at the end of this review), highlighting the challenge of “doing a degree in a language that is not your own […] because you have to find the spirit of another culture inside you, and to do that, a part of you has to die” (page 91).

I will never have the words to explain what it is like to be shot, to lose the ability to return home or to give up everything I expected my life to be, or why it felt as though I had died that day in St James’s Square and, through some grotesque accident, been reborn into the hapless shoes of an eighteen-year-old castaway, stranded in a foreign city where he knew no one and could be little use to himself, that all he could just about manage was to march through each day, from beginning to end, and then do it again. (page 189)

As time passes, Khaled becomes a “little less Arab and a little more Anglo”. He settles in Shepherd’s Bush, falls in love and sees his friends progress in their careers.

Then, when Gadaffi’s regime falls in 2011 — part of the broader Arab Spring uprising — everything gets turned upside down again. Khaled and his friends must each choose between the lives they’ve built in London and the ones they left behind…

Fine storytelling

What I loved about My Friends, aside from the quality of the storytelling, was the way it made me examine my own good fortune in being able to move easily between countries (I lived in the UK for 20 years but could always come back to my homeland of Australia at any time without fear of reprisals) and how speaking a common language makes things even easier again.

The book is political but wields its politics and social commentary lightly.

It’s a wonderful, engaging story, full of human heart and spanning **all** the emotions from grief to joy and back again. I have no doubt it will appear on my favourite books list at the end of the year.

Brona at This Reading Life also loved it.

♥    ♥    ♥

Books and writers mentioned

Just some of the books namechecked in this novel (in order of mention):

  • Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (my review)
  • The Epistle of Forgiveness by Abu al Ala al Ma’arri
  • Rain Song by Badr Shakir al Sayyab
  • The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta
  • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Leg Over Leg by Ahmad Faris al Shidyaq
  • Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
  • Parliament Hill Fields, a poem by Sylvia Plath
  • Praise, a poem by Robert Hass
  • Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  • Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
  • Thousand and One Nights
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
  • A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
  • After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys

Writers and poets namechecked:

  • Dambudzo Marechera
  • Dante
  • Robert Browning
  • the Brontes
  • Charles Dickens
  • Anthony Trollope
  • George Eliot
  • William Thackeray
  • Elizabeth Gaskell
  • Graham Greene
  • Henry James
  • Gustave Flaubert
  • Walter Scott
  • Naguib Mahfouz
  • Stendhal
  • Joseph Conrad
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Laurence Sterne
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Friedrich Hölderlin
  • Miguel de Cervantes
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Derek Walcott
  • T.S. Eliot
Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, New York, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Saul Bellow, Setting

‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 128 pages; 2011.

Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, first published in 1956, centres on a failed actor trapped by his life choices but unwilling to take the necessary action to get himself out of a hole.

It’s the story of a mediocre man who blames everyone but himself for his failings. Wilhelm Adler, whose stage name is “Tommy”, is 44 years old, separated from his wife (she refuses to grant him a divorce) and estranged from his two sons, Tommy, 14, and Paulie, 9.

Once a high-performing travelling salesman for a children’s toy company, he’s recently been fired despite his firmly held belief he was due a promotion. He blames a colleague for undercutting his territory and taking sales away from him.

Now unemployed and fast running out of money, Tommy is living in a New York residential hotel — the wonderfully named Gloriana — where his aged father, a well-respected doctor, also lives, albeit on a different floor. The pair have a fraught relationship — Dr Adler is disappointed in his son and thinks he needs to grow up; Tommy thinks his father should do more to help him financially — and their conversations are blunt and heated.

Downward spiral

This tightly written novella is set on a single day in the early 1950s but uses flashbacks and interior monologues to show how Tommy has arrived at his current stage in life.

It’s clear from the outset that Tommy is never honest with himself, makes repeated bad decisions, is a poor judge of character and feels victimised by external forces. He is generally distrustful of others and yet he gets more or less hoodwinked by two different men.

The first man to “con” him is Maurice Venice, a pimp masquerading as a Hollywood talent scout, who promises him potential fame and success in Hollywood but eventually drops him because he can’t secure him any roles outside of being an extra.

The second — some 20 years later — is Tamkin, who presents himself as a psychologist and financial adviser. He persuades Tommy to invest his remaining money in the commodities market, promising high returns that never materialise.

But while Tamkin’s financial advice is unreliable, his philosophical advice gives Tommy pause for thought. He encourages Tommy to adopt a more emotional and less materialistic approach to life, arguing that he needs to “stop thinking so much about the future and the past” (page 89).

“Nature only knows one thing, and that’s the present. Present, present, eternal present, like a big, huge, giant wave — colossal, bright and beautiful, full of life and death, climbing into the sky, standing in the seas. You must go along with the actual, the Here-and-Now, the glory—” (page 89)

This is just a foil to get Tommy to take more risks on the stock market, and even Tommy understands he’s being manipulated, which only adds to his increasing sense of desperation and loss.

A new low

Eventually, everything comes to a head, and he has an emotional breakdown in a public place.

It’s both cathartic and tragic for the reader, but the question of whether Tommy has reached his lowest point and is resilient enough to bounce back remains unanswered.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. Seize the Day was his fourth novel. I enjoyed this one so much that I’m now keen to explore more from his backlist.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘Cold Spring Harbor’ by Richard Yates: The story of another mediocre man trapped in a life of stifling domesticity, whose attempts to find meaning only deepen his sense of failure and frustration.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Jonathan Cape, literary fiction, Publisher, Roddy Doyle, Setting

‘The Women Behind the Door’ by Roddy Doyle

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Fiction – paperback; Jonathan Cape; 272 pages; 2024.

Roddy Doyle is the master of authentic dialogue, as his latest novel, The Women Behind the Door, firmly attests. He is also very perceptive about what makes women tick — and what they talk about.

The story crackles with sharp, often witty and heartbreaking conversations — frank, sometimes challenging, but always real and believable.

The book is the third in Doyle’s Paula Spencer series, which began with The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) and Paula Spencer (2006). The trilogy follows the life of the titular character, an Irish working-class woman who struggles with the aftermath of domestic abuse, poverty and alcoholism.

I have previously read the first (pre-blog) but not the second; however, this instalment can be read as a standalone.

Lockdown life

The Women Behind the Door is primarily set in Dublin during the COVID-19 pandemic (just as the first vaccines were being rolled out). At 66 years old, Paula Spencer is the first age cohort to be vaccinated.

She lives alone but has an “undefined relationship” with a local man, Joe, whom she met at her part-time job at the drycleaners and whom none of her friends seem to like. She’s not even sure how she feels about him herself.

On the evening of the day she’s vaccinated, her eldest daughter, middle-aged Nicola, turns up on her doorstep, declaring she’s not going back home to her husband and three daughters. She’s fed up and wants to move in with her mother while she gets her head together.

—D’you want to talk, Nicola?
—No.
But she did. She might not have wanted to talk but Paula heard — she thought she heard — a kind of click coming from Nicola’s throat. It sounded almost like the latch on a gate, or noise you’d make to show that you were changing your mind. And — whatever the noise was —  Nicola started to talk. (page 158)

The book examines this complex mother-daughter relationship as Nicola slowly reveals what brought her to this moment of crisis.

Talk therapy

The dialogue between the pair propels the novel along. There’s not much of a plot. It’s more a dissection of two characters — their personalities, motivations and history — unveiled through their conversations and anecdotes. As they talk, their true selves are revealed through subtle (and not-so-subtle) hints, underlying tensions and unspoken emotions.

Each exchange between Paula and Nicola peels back another layer of their relationship, exposing their vulnerabilities, conflicts and failings.

The interactions highlight how small words can carry big meaning, how miscommunication can strain relationships, and how even friendly exchanges can quickly sour.

Comedy and tragedy

It sounds heavy — and it is — but in Doyle’s hands, there is levity, quiet moments of joy and characters who “grow” in inspiring ways without being schmaltzy. There’s some great one-liners, too.

She won’t be drinking the tea and she isn’t really looking at the telly. She’s turned the sound down — she can barely hear it. Her other daughter, Leanne, told her that she holds the remote control like it’s a wand and Voldemort is coming at her.
—Which one is Voldemort?
—Ralph Fiennes.
—Well, in that case. He can come at me any time he wants. (page 5)

The Women Behind the Door treads a fine line between pathos and humour, balancing emotional depth with moments of lightness. It’s a wonderful examination of ordinary women’s lives, their shared histories, resilience, self-discovery and love.

Triple Choice Tuesday

Triple Choice Tuesday: Paul Grace

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Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday, an ad-hoc series I kicked off in 2010, which has been on hiatus for several years — but has now returned for 2024. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers. If you’d like to take part, simply visit this post and fill out the form!

Today’s guest is Paul Grace, a writer from Perth, Western Australia. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English from Curtin University and years of experience as a bookseller and community radio broadcaster.

His first book is Operation Hurricane: The story of Britain’s first atomic test in Australia and the legacy that remains (Hachette Australia, 2023). It was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards 2024—Book of the Year and the 2024 Margaret Medcalf Award. (I reviewed it here.)

Paul lives in Perth with his wife and their dog, a kelpie/border collie cross. You can view his author page on Facebook here.

Without further ado, here are Paul’s choices:

A favourite book: ‘Master and Commander’ by Patrick O’Brian

Master and Commander is the first book in the Aubrey–Maturin series, an epic 20-part saga of heroism and adventure on the high seas in the age of Napoleon. The whole series is wonderful, but there is no series without Master and Commander, which is so convincing in its depiction of life aboard a Royal Navy vessel (HM Sloop Sophie) that many first-time readers mistakenly assume it was written in the nineteenth century (it was published in 1969). The rigid social order, the discipline, the camaraderie, the arcane ‘jackspeak’ (naval slang); the verisimilitude is complete. And it is funny! The author delights in the petty squabbles that inevitably arise when dozens of men are crammed into close quarters for months on end.

But most importantly Master and Commander introduces the duo whose unlikely friendship forms the emotional core of the series: bluff English naval officer Jack Aubrey and brilliant Irish surgeon, ‘natural philosopher’ and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin. Despite their differences, Aubrey and Maturin stick together through victories, defeats, shipwrecks, imprisonments, bankruptcies, duels, heartbreaks and more. It is a friendship to warm the heart of even the hardest old salt.

I have completed three circumnavigations with Jack and Stephen (that’s what we fans call finishing the series); I wish you joy of your first.

A book that changed my world: ‘The Song of Achilles’ by Madeline Miller

I have always been fascinated by Greek mythology and the tales of Homer, and immediately read The Song of Achilles on release in 2011. Even so, I was completely unprepared for how much it would affect me.

Madeline Miller has a Master’s degree in Classics and it shows. The Song of Achilles is her first novel (it won the Orange Prize) and is a retelling of the Iliad from the point of view of Patroclus, beloved ‘cousin’ of Achilles in standard Penguin Classics editions. But in Miller’s telling, informed by deep research of ancient texts, the two warriors are lovers. Their relationship is depicted with empathy and complexity; the prose is stunning and poetic, yet simple and precise. Sometimes I stopped to read sentences over and over.

The Song of Achilles turned my understanding of the Iliad on its head. To be honest, Miller’s version of events makes far more sense than Penguin’s, especially considering Achilles’s behaviour towards the end of the tale (no spoilers).

Miller’s equally impressive follow-up, Circe, is a feminist retelling of the Odyssey from the perspective of Circe, a witch who encounters Odysseus on his travels. Together, the two novels have inspired me to rethink traditionally masculine, heteronormative depictions of men at war and seek out more diverse voices in my reading.

A book that deserves a wider audience: ‘Mother Night’ by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

A counter-culture icon of the sixties, Kurt Vonnegut Jr was a prolific humourist, humanist and science-fiction writer. His genre-defying semi-autobiographical anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five is still required reading in many university lit classes and book clubs. But in my experience, few people have heard of my favourite Vonnegut novel: Mother Night.

Mother Night is the story of Howard W Campbell Jr, a German-American playwright recruited by the CIA to work as an undercover agent in Nazi Germany. Campbell’s job is to deliver coded messages to Allied intelligence in Nazi propaganda broadcasts. Unfortunately, he is such a good propagandist that he becomes an infamous war criminal, forced to spend the rest of his life in hiding.

A slender volume of 176 pages, Mother Night is disproportionately profound and shockingly relevant. Campbell says and does evil things while telling himself it is for the greater good, but what if the evil he does outweighs the good? His self-delusion echoes the logic of politicians, commentators and online trolls who cynically stoke hatred and division, only to deny culpability, in the age of deep fakes and alternate facts.

The moral of Mother Night, stated on the very first page, is: ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’

I quote it all the time.

What do you think of Paul’s choices? Have you read any of these books?

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Lawrence Osborne, literary fiction, Morocco, Publisher, Setting, Vintage Digital

‘The Forgiven’ by Lawrence Osborne

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 324 pages; 2013.

I do love a novel about travel or a holiday, especially if the trip turns out to be disastrous or full of jeopardy!

Lawrence Osborne’s The Forgiven fits right into that category. Indeed, it would make a worthy addition to my “holidays from hell” list, which I compiled many years ago.

Tipping its hat very much in the direction of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, it’s the story of an unhappily married couple, David and Jo Henninger, from London, who travel to Morroco to attend a lavish weekend party hosted by their wealthy American friends.

But on the drive out to the remote desert property, an intoxicated David accidentally hits and kills a young man. The couple arrive at the villa hours late with the man’s body in the back seat of their car.

The narrative charts what unfolds as a result of this tragedy. The novel is billed as a psychological thriller, but while it’s undoubtedly suspenseful in places, it has a brooding, almost oppressive, intensity that feels more akin to an examination of existential dread, moral ambiguity and the abuse of privilege than anything else.

Check your privilege 

It’s challenging to write about the plot without revealing spoilers, so I will keep this brief and slightly vague.

From the outset, it’s clear that David is not a particularly nice character. He’s a “handsome specimen of arrogant pride and exact manners” (page 232) who carries “a cosmic gloom with him” (page 299). He’s a doctor who also thinks he’s far superior to everyone else, despite the fact that he’s recently been sued by a patient for malpractice.  His wife, Jo, is a children’s book editor whose career is failing.

This Moroccan trip is, in many respects, a chance to reset.

Together, the pair bicker and squabble over seemingly trivial things when they first arrive in Morocco, but when the tragedy occurs, they present a united front that belies the fractures at the heart of their relationship. But it later becomes clear that the man’s death, which they had caused, “had altered for ever the relation between them, and they both knew it” (page 291).

Rich versus poor

One of the book’s strengths is its examination of the cultural divide between wealthy Westerners and the local Moroccan people scrabbling to make a living. Occasionally, this comes across as patronising, but I think this is David’s viewpoint rather than the author’s personal take.

Could anyone really imagine their lives? One look at them was enough to confirm that they made their living as fossil diggers and preppers. That they eked out a miserable existence trading second-rate trilobites in the tourist shops of Erfoud and Rissani. One saw types like that all over the place, shabby desperadoes wandering from table to table at the hotels, offering trays of their wares, quietly hustling Westerners on the side, swearing their trilobites were the rarest of the Sahara, but going home empty-handed to their shacks on the edge of the desert. (page 98)

It also nicely explores guilt and responsibility — David, for instance, seems disinterested in saying sorry, joking that “they want me to say I’m sorry. That’s what people always want. It’s like being on Oprah ’ (page 135).  Jo is more remorseful and anxiety-ridden,  but knows her “exhausting guilt” has “no resolution” because “who could she beg to be forgiven?” (page 131)

The party hosts, a wealthy gay American couple, are more pragmatic. As Moroccan residents, they know culturally how to deal with the crime that has been brought to their door, but it’s about saving face rather than a genuine sense of responsibility. Their actions are driven by the need to maintain appearances, masking the underlying fear and discomfort with a polished veneer of control.

His parties were written up on blogs across Europe, in garish magazines and sometimes in the New York Times, and he didn’t want a bad reputation to descend upon them. (page 157)

Sublime writing

The characters are all brilliantly drawn. They are vain, loathsome and just plain horrible people with little sense of moral culpability. David thinks he can simply throw his money around and all will be well. There never seems to be any acknowledgement of the pain and suffering he has caused, which chimes with his career failings as a doctor.

It has to be said that spending time with these people isn’t particularly pleasant, but they do get their comeuppance!

The author also makes up for it with his beautiful prose, particularly when he turns his painterly eye to the desert landscape.

The road was steep. It passed under ponderous, fractured cliffs, winding past plots of fig trees and then slopes of iron-red dirt, dark as fresh liver, where tiny black goats stood stock-still with quivering ears. (page 210)

And:

He loved the desert at this hour. A wild camel nosed its way along the black ribbon of the road, and far off at the opening of the valley a menacing orange light gathered. The fig trees in the garden shuddered as if beaten with sticks, but there was little wind during those moments. The hour of dusk could be tasted, but not seen. (page 94)

The Forgiven is the British writer’s sixth novel (Wikipedia tells me he has 13 to his name) and was adapted for the screen, starring Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes, in 2021. I have not seen the movie and am not sure I could bear to!

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, France, Jessie Tu, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Honeyeater’ by Jessie Tu

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Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 322; 2024.

Australian writer Jessie Tu’s debut novel, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, was a big hit in 2020. I loved it so much that it made my “Books of the Year” list at the time.

In that refreshingly frank story, a musical prodigy struggled to find her feet in the adult world, had to “manage” an overly strict mother and developed a sexual relationship with a much older man.

Her eagerly awaited second book, The Honeyeater, deals with similar themes — a close bond with a mother and an affair with an older man — but replaces the music element with what it’s like to make your mark as a translator under the mentorship of a renowned academic.

And while I ate it up in the space of a day (to be fair, I was at home recovering from scheduled surgery and unable to do much else), I thought the first-person narrative tried to do too much.

It starts off as a rather touching story about a mother and daughter’s European travel adventure, with flashbacks to an unhappy romance, before it morphs into a murder mystery and suspense tale. All the while, it explores the world of academia, the role of mentors, and translation as a career. I came away from it thinking it lacked a sort of, well, coherence.

Was it supposed to be heavy-hitting and have important things to say? Or was it an “entertainment” about betrayal in love and academia? Was it lit fic, crime fic, romance or travel? Character driven? Plot driven? Or a combination of all of the above?

From France to Taiwan

The story, which is divided into three parts — Paris, July 2018; Sydney, August 2018; and Taipei, September 2018 — is narrated by Fay, a young academic and emerging translator (of Mandarin to English) who has just called off an affair with a married man.

She goes on a package holiday to France, taking her mother with her, but the pair find it hard to relax — Fay is working on a translation on behalf of her mentor, Professor Samantha Egan-Smith, and needs to meet a deadline, while her mother, who suffers from an obsessive-compulsive cleaning disorder, never really wants to leave their hotel room.

On the last night of their European tour, Fay receives news that — quelle surprise, for it is written on the back cover blurb!! — her former lover has died in suspicious circumstances.

Back on home soil, Fay must now contend with keeping her former affair under wraps lest the police draw her into their investigation.

At the same time, the Professor offers her a career-defining opportunity — to present a paper at a prestigious translation conference in Taipei — so now she must compartmentalise her emotional life to hold everything together for the sake of her professional advancement.

Plot problems

I’ve skipped over the main plot points to avoid spoilers, but my main issue with The Honeyeater is its clunky plot machinations. Everything feels too apparent. I guessed the “reveals” before they were revealed, and I could see the author’s agenda (and research) conveyed too clearly.  The ending is also weak, offering a denouement that felt shoehorned in.

Yet Tu can write beautifully. Her prose has a dreamy, detached quality, and her dialogue is authentic.

I liked her insights into the duality of mother-daughter relationships, which can be both loving and claustrophobic, and the complexity of student-mentor relationships, which are shaped by power dynamics, emotional dependence and mutual expectations.

Her observations on the art of translation are excellent, particularly Fay’s view that the job is invisible and that a translator’s role is to “finish a project and leave no fingerprints behind” (page 51).

And this:

There are two main views on translation regarding Asian languages — translation to build the new and common, which was the view I adhere to; and translation that highlighted the differences between each culture. […] For me, the two opposing views rested on the idea of faithfulness, which was determined by the value you placed in the cultural intricacies of the source text. (page 121)

But on the whole, the tone of The Honeyeater is askance. The author is trying to offer up something “important” but it’s just “entertainment” — a superficial attempt at depth that never quite resonates. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s hard to take this one as anything other than a light, fun read.

If you liked this, you might also like

‘Intimacies’ by Katie Kitamura: an interpreter working at the International Court in the Hague grapples with the emotional challenges of her job translating the testimony of war criminals.

‘After Story’ by Larissa Behrendt: an Australian Aboriginal mother and daughter embark on a tour of England’s most revered literary sites and discover surprising things about each other.

‘Cold Enough For Snow’ by Jessica Au: an angst-ridden daughter takes her introverted mother on a holiday to Japan but the trip is problematic for all kinds of reasons.

Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Rita Bullwinkel, Setting, USA

‘Headshot’ by Rita Bullwinkel

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Daunt Books; 250 pages; 2024.

Rita Bullwinkel’s highly original novel Headshot has been longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

The book follows eight teenage girls competing in the 18 & Under Daughters of America boxing tournament over two intense days. Each chapter focuses on a different bout as the athletes fight for the championship title.

While the story centres on the sport of boxing, with all its violence, brutality and show of strength, it also looks at the lives of each girl behind the scenes, outlines their individual hopes and dreams, and provides a tantalising glimpse of their future careers.

Future impact

Expertly told in the present tense using compelling, effortless prose, the author cleverly uses foreshadowing to illuminate each girl’s character and to show how the punches they throw today will have an impact further down the line:

Artemis doesn’t know it now, this additional dozen number of finger breakings has already pushed the fragility that is her human hand over the bridge and into the realm of permanently damaged. When Artemis is sixty she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea. (page 22)

It also highlights how the girls are probably too young to understand the consequences:

She and Artemis are both technically children, not yet able to join the military or have a drink of alcohol or have an abortion without the signature of someone who is related to them in most of the fifty states. And yet, this sport that they are playing, this simulation of killing, necessitates that Andi and Artemis understand themselves not as children, but as young humans, who possess the power to control their fate and their wins. (page 42)

And nor does it shy away from the sheer rawness of the sport:

Language has no place inside the gym. Inside the gym the language used is the language of animals – the language of smell and feeling and sound. (page 132)

No glamour

The tale presented here is far from glamorous. The tournament is held in a relatively rundown gym with poor facilities chosen merely for its central location “in the middle of the American heartland” and because the owner has connections to the association that oversees women’s boxing. He gets paid $100 for every entrant competing.

The book is underpinned by a subtle feminist subtext, too, including, for instance, the fact the tournament is preceded over by men — coaches, referees, judges and gym owners — who profit from the sport despite the lack of respect for women’s boxing:

It was not as if women’s boxing was, or ever had, or ever would be something respected enough to put every ounce of your energy into. (page 21)

Creative writing

Unfortunately, Headshot starts to feel repetitive after a while; it comes across as more of a creative writing exercise.

There’s no overarching plot beyond the boxing tournament,  so it feels like a collection of short stories framed around the bouts. That’s not a bad thing per se — I did actually race through the book in next to no time and enjoyed it — but I do wonder how much of it will “stick”.

I did, however, love the insights into each individual character, including Andi, a lifesaver grappling with the drowning of a young boy she failed to save; the super-competitive cousins Iggy and Izzy, who fight each other in the ring; Tanya Maw, who wants to be an actress; and religious Rose Mueller who wants to box because it’s a sport “where the rules were clear at all times” in stark contrast to church, where “there is so much mystery” (page 183).

And the writing is filled with sharp-as-a-tack descriptions that had me pausing for thought on almost every page. Here’s a couple of examples:

Their coach stands outside the ring, in a neutral corner. He looks like the relative everyone wished declined the obligatory invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. (page 93)

And:

Rose Mueller and Rachel Doricko keep swapping round victories as if they are collaborative painters taking turns on the same canvas. Rachel Doricko boxes with the quick strokes of an impressionist, whereas Rose Mueller boxes with the detail of a photorealist. (page 201)

The Booker Prize shortlist will be announced on Monday (16 September). It will be interesting to see if Headshot makes the cut.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘A History of Running Away’ by Paula McGrath: the story of a young girl who dreams of escaping her restrictive life in 1980s Ireland to pursue boxing in London.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023)

20 books of summer — 2024 recap

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Well, that’s another season of reading done and dusted.

I had planned to read 20 books from my TBR between 1 June and 31 August as part of Cathy’s annual 20 Books of Summer challenge, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

This is the eighth year I have participated in #20BooksOfSummer. Last year I completed it successfully; this year has been a different story.

This summer winter I only managed to read 15 books — four non-fiction, 10 literary fiction and one crime novella — from my TBR. But I should probably point out that I read a couple of additional books from my local library and a handful of new releases, but these did not count towards my #20BooksofSummer total. You can’t win them all, right?

The 15 books that did qualify for the challenge came from around the world: three from Ireland, two each from Australia, France, the UK and the US, and one each from Antigua, Argentina, Italy and New Zealand.

I loved all the books I read, but the standouts were Catherine Chidgey’s novel Pet, Mariana Dimópulos’ novella All My Goodbyes and Mark O’Connell’s true crime book A Thread of Violence.

Two of the books were re-reads — John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault — which made me fall in love with them all over again and reminded me that I ought to revisit favourite novels more often… if only there weren’t so many books in my TBR vying for attention!

Here’s what I read

If you’d like to explore the reviews I wrote, please click this tag to see them all appear on one page. Alternatively, please just click the covers below (or tap them if you are reading on a mobile device). The books have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname.

Did you take part in #20BooksOfSummer? How did you do? Which book has been your favourite read of the summer (or winter)?