Category: literary fiction

Author, Barbara Comyns, Book review, Daunt Books, England, Fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead’ by Barbara Comyns

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 201 pages; 2021.

I have long wanted to read something by Barbara Comyns (1907-1992), an English novelist widely respected and often championed by book bloggers but her work is hard to come by in Australia — unless you want to place a special order.

So when I saw Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, her third novel, sitting on the shelves at Readings Emporium store on a recent trip to Melbourne, I snapped it up.

First published in 1954, the novel is set about 20 years earlier in the small English village of Warwickshire at around the time of King George VI’s coronation.

It tells the story of the Willoweed family  — widower Ebin; his three children, Emma, Dennis and Hattie; his 71-year-old mother; their live-in maids, Norah and Eunice; and the gardener known as Old Ives — and charts their experiences during a series of bizarre and tragic events, which begins with a flood that foreshadows more disaster to come.

Strange objects of pitiful aspect floated past: the bloated body of a drowned sheep, the wool withering about in the water, a white beehive with the perplexed bees still around; a newborn pig, all pink and dead; and the mournful bodies of the peacocks. […] Now a tabby cat with a distended belly passed, its little paws showing above the water, its small head hanging low. [page 8]

That gruesome scene establishes the book’s mood, which is quite dark and oppressive, tinged with just the barest dusting of humour and laced with much cruelty.

Badly behaved grandmother

That cruelty comes in the form of a domineering matriarch — Ebin’s mother, who is called Grandmother Willoweed throughout — who conducts herself with a ruthless disregard for the feelings and well-being of those around her. She terrorises her family by subjecting them to her vile jibes, violent rages and rude behaviour, forcing everyone to tread on metaphorical eggshells.

On one occasion she hurls a brass candlestick down the stairs, repeatedly puts down her son (in front of others) and calls him a fool, and later develops a “pathetic whine” which embarrasses those around her. The word “witch” comes to mind:

She looked like a dreadful old black bird, enormous and horrifying, all weighed down by jet and black plumes and smelling, not of camphor, but chlorodyne. [page 57]

The novel isn’t just about Grandmother Willoweed and her long-suffering family; it also explores a mysterious contagion that infects many of the villagers, causing strange behaviour and fatalities. And with any unexplained pandemic, there are instances of panic, victim-blaming, finger pointing and paranoia. There are many deaths, including those of children.

Eccentric tale

It’s an odd story, morbid and often ghoulish, a mixture of the domestic with the surreal. I didn’t like it very much, nor the distant, almost off-hand style in which it was written, and I struggled to pick it up again whenever I put it down.

Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for reading about eccentric behaviour and dysfunctional families, but either way, I’m wondering if Barbara Comyns is really for me or whether I just started with the wrong book.

For more favourable reviews, please see those by Jacqui at JacquiWine’s Journal, Simon at Stuck in a Book, and Radz at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.

Author, Book review, Cesare Pavese, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Beautiful Summer’ by Cesare Pavese (translated by W.J. Strachan)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 112 pages; 2018. Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan.

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize for fiction, in 1950. (The author sadly died by suicide a couple of months later.)

It’s the story of a teenage girl whose friendship with an older woman draws her into a bohemian artistic community in 1930s Turin, showing her an alternative way of life.

It has been reissued as part of Penguin’s European Writers series.

A girl’s life

Sixteen-year-old Ginia works at a dressmakers and lives with her brother, Severino, a nightshift worker, for whom she cooks and cleans.

To alleviate the mundane nature of her work and home life, she’s keen to go “gadding about”, as she describes it, so when she develops a friendship with 20-year-old Amelia who works as an artists’ model, her social life opens up. They go to dance halls, visit cafes and see films at the local movie house. But there’s always tension between them, because Ginia is cautious, whereas Amelia throws that all to the wind.

In public, Amelia dares to go bare-legged (because she can’t afford to buy stockings), making Ginia anxious and worried about what people might say. Yet this also holds an allure for her, because she’s fascinated by Amelia’s way of being in the world, her freedom and her carefree attitude.

‘Being free in the world in the way I am, makes me mad,’ said Amelia. Ginia would have gladly paid money to hear her hold forth so eagerly on many things which she liked, because real confidence consists in knowing what the other person wants and when someone else is pleased by the same things, you no longer feel in awe of her. (page 14)

Loss of innocence

In her short introduction to the novella, Elizabeth Strout explains that Pavese described it as “the story of a virginity that defends itself”. For most of the book, Ginia acts chastely but she’s fascinated by the adults around her and wages an internal battle to overcome her disgust and shame associated with what she sees and what she wants to experience for herself. She knows she has power over men but is fearful of wielding it.

When Amelia gets a new job posing naked for an artist, Ginia asks to watch, not for any voyeuristic tendencies but to observe the artist at work.

They discussed the question for a short part of the walk and Amelia laughed because, dressed or undressed, a model can only be of interest to men and hardly to another girl. The model merely stands there: what is there to see? Ginia said she wanted to see the artist paint her; she had never seen anyone handling colours and it must be nice to watch. (page 12)

When she gets to watch the proceedings, she finds she’s disgusted by the whole sexual objectification of her friend and her friend’s inability to understand that this is what is happening.

Once more she saw Amelia’s swarthy belly in that semi-darkness, that very ordinary face and those drooping breasts. Surely a woman offered a better subject dressed? If painters wanted to do them in the nude, they must have ulterior motives. Why did they not draw from male models? Even Amelia when disgracing herself in that way became a different person; Gina was almost in tears. (page 23)

Later, Amelia introduces her to two artists, Guido and Rodrigues, who share a studio. Ginia is intrigued by the enigmatic Guido, a soldier who is an artist in his spare time, and a love affair develops — ushering her into a more complex adult world.

Compelling novella

The Beautiful Summer has a simple set-up and follows a predictable outcome. But it’s written in such a rich, lyrical language, with an undercurrent of suspense and danger, it makes for a compelling read.

Strout suggests there are hints of Elena Ferrante in the narrative style, to which I concur. Its depiction of female friendship, including its petty rivalries, quarrels and sharing of confidences, is pitch-perfect, and I loved the melancholia at its heart.

It not only explores themes of youth, desire and loss of innocence, but it also poses questions about the male gaze, sexual objectification and women’s position in Italian society at the time. It demands a reread to properly unpick it, but has certainly made me keen to explore more of Pavase’s work — I read, and loved, The House on the Hill last year.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Delphine de Vigan, Europa Editions, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan (translated by Alison Anderson)

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Fiction – paperback; Europa Editions; 300 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson.

Children’s right to privacy in the Internet age is at the heart of Kids Run the Show, a provocative novel — part crime thriller, part social commentary — by French writer Delphine de Vigan.

The story focuses on Mélanie Claux, a young mother of two, who exploits her children online for financial gain.

It is set against a backdrop of calls to regulate the commercial exploitation of children by their parents and to classify the activity as work. In fact, in 2021, France introduced a law to protect “child influencers” on social media because it regards it as a form of child labour, which is already outlawed. The legislation is designed to protect the rights of children who are making money online via online platforms and the Internet.

Mélanie, a failed reality TV star (she got voted off Loft Story, France’s first reality TV show, an adaptation of the Big Brother franchise, early in the first season), is desperate for love and attention. Unable to achieve it for herself, she sets about achieving it vicariously through her children via a YouTube account called “Happy Recess”.

Here she posts cute videos of 8-year-old Sammy and 6-year-old Kimmy, which go viral, attract millions of “likes” and rack up the follower numbers. Happy Recess becomes so successful it generates enough money to support both Mélanie and her husband, Bruno, who live in a beautiful apartment full of beautiful objects, many of which are “freebies” sent to them for review or endorsement purposes.

Kidnapped for ransom

But when Kimmy disappears while playing hide-and-seek with other children in their apartment building early one evening, Mélanie’s carefully curated life begins to fall apart.

At 21:30 Mélanie Claux received a short private message on her Instagram account. The sender, whose name was unknown to her, had no followers of their own. Everything indicated that the account had been created with the sole purpose of sending her the following message: “Kid missing, deal coming,” which confirmed the theory of kidnapping for ransom. (page 33)

The case is referred to the Paris Crime Squad and investigative officer Clara Roussel has the thankless task of trawling through hours and hours of Happy Recess YouTube videos, looking for clues to Kimmy’s disappearance.

The list of suspects is long (possibly anyone who has ever watched a Kimmy video) and Clara’s task is a challenging one. But this isn’t a strict police procedural, rather it’s a thought-provoking examination of how social media has eroded our sense of privacy and created new opportunities to generate lucrative income streams — but at what cost?

The borders between private and public had disappeared long ago. This staging of the self, of one’s everyday life, the pursuit of likes: this was not something Mélanie had made up. It had become a way of life, a way of being in the world. One-third of the children who were born already had a digital life. (page 190)

The last section of the novel fast-forwards to 2031 to look at the long-term impact of the case on each of the main protagonists. It makes for uncomfortable reading.

Kids Run the Show is a clarion call, warning parents about the dangers of turning children into media stars before they are old enough to understand the consequences of their fame.

Guy at His Futile Preoccupations has also reviewed this.

Author, Book review, Colm Tóibín, Fiction, Germany, historical fiction, literary fiction, Picador, Publisher, Setting, Switzerland, USA

‘The Magician’ by Colm Tóibín

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Fiction – paperback; Picador; 436 pages; 2021.

Colm Tóibín is one of my favourite writers, but The Magician didn’t quite work for me.

It’s an account of the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning German author Thomas Mann (1875-1955), whose work — Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain et al — I’ve never read, so part of me wonders whether I might have enjoyed the experience more if I was familiar with his writing.

Yet, on the face of it, Mann is the perfect subject for a fictionalised biography because his life was so intriguing on so many levels — economically, socially, politically, sexually. He was born into a rich mercantile family, but his father left them high and dry when he died, and it was up to Mann to find his calling as a writer.

A closeted homosexual with a (supposed) interest in young boys, he went on to marry the devoted and independently minded Katia, who was from a wealthy industrialist family, with whom he had six children. Three of their children went on to become famous writers.

But Mann’s life was marred by the times in which he lived, particularly the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II, during which he fled to Switzerland and later the US. Despite his wealth, he and Katia never seemed to settle in one place, moving constantly between Europe and America, and spending time in Sweden.

His fame meant he was often called upon to criticise Hitler and the Nazi Party, but he was reluctant to use his platform, frightened that it would put other family members at risk, but perhaps, also, because he was more interested in his own self-preservation, of living a quiet life in which he could continue his writing uninterrupted.

Tóibín chooses to tell Mann’s story in a distant third voice so that we don’t really get much of an insight into Mann’s motivations. The closest we get to a seemingly non-existent interior voice is when he frets that his diaries, which detail his sexual fantasies, may fall into the wrong hands.

And despite the great cast of characters that surround him — in particular, his transgressive, sexually outrageous-for-the-times offspring Erika and Klaus — we never really discover what others think of him. The only hint is toward the end, when his youngest son Michael sends him quite a scathing letter, claiming that he has neglected his children in favour of his creative life.

‘I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side. It is hard to credit that you both stayed in your luxury hotel while my brother was being buried. I told no one in Cannes that you were in Europe. They would not have believed me.

‘You are a great man. Your humanity is widely appreciated and applauded. I am sure you are enjoying loud praise in Scandinavia. It hardly bothers you, most likely, that these feelings of adulation are not shared by any of your children. As I walked away from my brother’s grave, I wished you to know how deeply sad I felt for him.’ (page 394)

Perhaps the reason I struggled to fully engage with this novel was the complete lack of emotion in it. Both Mann and his wife come across as rather cold fish. Was it a protective coping device? A way of saving face?

It’s hard to know, because despite the many deaths in the family which are detailed here — including the deaths by suicide of Mann’s sisters in separate incidents, and the loss of a son-in-law when the Transatlantic passenger ship he was travelling on was torpedoed during the war  — Mann does not appear to shed a tear. He chooses to bury himself in his work.

Even the rivalry that Mann has with his older brother, Heinrich, who was also a writer, does not seem to trouble him and yet they had been close, living together in Italy when they were both young men. United by their desire to escape their bourgeois roots and the long shadow of their late father — a senator and grain merchant of some repute — they appear to have chosen completely different paths; Heinrich takes the radical, outspoken path, Thomas chooses the one of least resistance.

This is reflected much later in the circumstances in which they live in America: Heinrich and his ditzy second wife Nelly live in a squalid apartment; Thomas and Katia reside in a large, flashy house with an enormous garden.

Of course, the problem with a fictionalised biography of this nature is the lack of distinction between fact and fiction. I do not know enough about Mann’s life to recognise what is an act of Tóibín’s imagination and what is real.

I had hoped to take The Magician as I found it, to enjoy a story about a fascinating writer who was beset by deeply personal challenges throughout his life, but what I got was a rather plodding account of a seemingly unknowable man. Perhaps, in the end, that was Tóibín’s point?

For other takes on this novel, please see Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers and Brona’s at This Reading Life.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth24. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Book review, Fiction, Holland/Netherlands, Jonathan Cape, Katie Kitamura, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Intimacies’ by Katie Kitamura

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Fiction – hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 225 pages; 2021.

Can there be a more intimate act than listening to a war criminal’s testimony and then interpreting it — in real-time — in an international courtroom setting?

Such interpreters often deal with sensitive subjects — including violence, death and ethnic cleansing — but must maintain impartiality and communicate what they hear accurately and without emotion.

Or, as the first-person narrator in Katie Kitamura’s extraordinary novel Intimacies says, they must make the “spaces between languages as small as possible”.

[…] interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning. […] And yet—as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand—something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, cross-border raid, mass grave, armed youth. (pages 116-117)

Set in The Hague

In this compelling story, told in languid first-person prose, the unnamed interpreter accepts a one-year contract at the International Court in The Hague [1] on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands. It’s the perfect opportunity to escape New York City, where she was raised, following the death of her father after a long illness and her mother’s return to Singapore.

Here, in a strange new European city, with a new job, she tries to adjust to a new way of life, aware that her colleagues all seem super confident, even flamboyant, while she’s more introspective and focused on just getting through the year without making any drastic errors.

Asked to interpret for a former president who has been accused of the worst crimes against humanity, she grapples with the emotional challenges of her job. And outside of work, she also grapples with two intertwined issues: her identity and a sense of home.

Australian paperback edition

A tale of contradictions

The story is full of paradoxes. In this calm and peaceful city, the narrator is surprised to discover there’s an undercurrent of violence; the international criminal court, which strives to provide justice for victims regardless of their nationality, is said to have an African bias; and the extreme nature of certain atrocities, such as genocide or war crimes, is in complete contrast to the mundane characteristics of the individuals who commit them.

Any wonder the narrator seeks to build intimate relationships with good people — she needs them for emotional support, companionship and fun. She finds this with Jana, a single Black woman in her forties who is a curator at the Mauritshuis museum, who becomes a close friend.

Her character was the opposite of mine, she was almost compulsively open whereas I had grown guarded in recent years, my father’s illness had served as a quiet warning against too much hope. She entered my life at a moment when I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of intimacy. I felt a cool relief in her garrulous company, and I thought in our differences we achieved a kind of equilibrium. (pages 2-3)

And then there’s her lover, Adriaan, whose “intrinsic ease” with her offers a sense of normalcy, routine and comfort. But while intimate, it’s an ambiguous relationship for Adriaan is married with children (“He had been left by his wife a year earlier”) and for much of the novel he’s in Lisbon, trying to sort things out with his estranged wife, leaving our narrator with a set of keys to his substantially sized apartment because it “would make me happy to imagine you here”.

On the surface, this seems a wholly intimate act, to reside in your lover’s home, surrounded by his things (and his wife’s things), but it soon becomes a chore when Adriaan stops communicating and his one-week trip morphs into an extended period away with no end date in sight.

Quiet and understated

Intimacies is a quietly understated novel about big issues (another paradox!), including morality, crimes against humanity, trauma, justice and the importance of language, especially the way it is interpreted and conveyed.

I loved reading about the intricacies of this line of work, of the pressure to do it against the clock and to do it accurately so that a reliable witness doesn’t appear unreliable and doesn’t affect the “outcome of a trial”.

It’s a stylish novel, full of beautifully crafted sentences, the kind that meander but are deeply personal and contemplative. It’s a beguiling tale, but there’s an undercurrent of suspense, too — will Adriaan ever return, for instance, and will the former president do or say something in the courtroom to unravel her professional demeanour?

I highly recommend adding this one to your list — I’m confident it will be going on my list of favourite reads for 2024!

Thanks to Brona’s at This Reading Life for bringing this extraordinary novel to my attention and to the Festival Mavens (on Instagram), whose concise review confirmed that I really needed to read it.

 

[1] In her acknowledgements, the author writes: “Although the court that appears in this novel does contain certain similarities to the Internationa Criminal Court, it is in no way intended to represent that institution or its activities”

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Tonim Morrison, USA, Vintage

‘Sula’ by Toni Morrison

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Fiction – paperback; Vintage Classics; 208 pages; 2022.

“Begging you to read Sula by Toni Morrison,” my niece Monet said in a WhatsApp message in mid-January. “Finishing that book felt like a break-up… it’s my new favourite book.”

With such high praise, I put in a reservation request at my local library and a few weeks later the book was available for me to read.

When I was about a third of the way through it, I sent Monet a message: “OMG. This book. The mother burning her son. The two girls drowning that little boy.”

It was a story that was full of jaw-dropping moments, most of which I didn’t see coming. It gave the story a compelling and powerful edge.

Sula comes in at less than 200 pages, but it contains a lifetime of angst, love, joy, death, tragedy and humour. Every page contains something surprising or revelatory.

I filled it with Post-It tabs, which I use to mark passages I like or think important to the story, and writing this review now, I’m not quite sure how to summarise the book except to say it’s a powerful yet unconventional tale about friendship, identity, betrayal, systematic racism and the consequences of societal expectations in a small American town in the early to mid-20th century.

The tension between tradition and rebellion, conformity and individuality, are central themes.

It was Morrison’s second novel, first published in 1973, and is largely regarded as being integral to the formation of black feminist literary criticism.

But I didn’t read the book through that lens, nor, I’m sure did Monet.

I read it as a compelling tale about a Black community framed around the unlikely friendship between two girls, the titular Sula Peace and Nel Wright, from opposite sides of the social spectrum who become super close as children but choose different paths to follow as adults. In the end, their friendship disintegrates spectacularly but leaves both feeling lonely and misunderstood.

My thoughts

👍🏽 I loved the way Morrison paints such an evocative portrait of the town known as Bottom and then fills it with intriguing and flawed characters, including

  • Sula, a complex and rebellious figure who defies societal norms and expectations and has a birthmark on her face which might be a sign of the devil
  • her friend Nel, who represents conformity and tradition in contrast to the way Sula lives her life
  • Helene, Nel’s mother, who strives for respectability and acceptance
  • Hannah Peace, Sula’s mother, known for her beauty, promiscuity and carefree attitude
  • Eva Peace, Sula’s grandmother, a strong and resilient woman who raises her grandchildren after their mother’s abandonment.

👍🏽 I was taken aback by the shocks that come one after another, but they make the book compelling and page-turning. There’s death by burning (twice), death by drowning, adultery and personal confrontations.

Morrison sets the scene pretty early on by having Shadrack, a seriously traumatised Great War veteran, discharged from hospital far too early. Left to his own devices with just “$217 in cash, a full suit of clothes and copies of very official looking papers”, he has nowhere to go and is too weak to walk steadily along the gravel shoulder of the road he heads out west on.

Passengers in dark, square cars shuttered their eyes at what they took to be a drunken man. […] The police took him to jail, booked him for vagrancy and intoxication, and locked him in a cell. (pages 12-13)

👍🏽 I appreciated the way Morrison integrates casual and systematic racism into the narrative to show that this is the way Black people were treated but makes no commentary on the injustice of it; she just lets the examples sit there and if you weren’t looking for it or lack lived experience, it’s so subtle you might not even notice.

As an example, when Helene takes Nel on a train journey, she is shocked to discover the restrooms are reserved for white people only. When she asks a fellow passenger where the toilet is, she’s told it’s over “yonder” and is directed to a field of long grass.

And when a bargeman tells the sheriff that he’s found a young Black boy’s body in the river, the sheriff is completely disinterested because “they didn’t have no niggers in their country” and is advised to “throw it on back into the water” as if the boy was a piece of rubbish.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽 This is an absolutely gorgeous book. The prose is beautiful and flawless in its entirety. The twists are so unexpected; the way it’s written you have no idea what’s going to happen next. And the relationships between the characters are magnificent.

👍🏽 I was instantly hooked by the retelling of Nel on the train. The racism was shocking to read about — especially considering that this was the average life of an African-American woman in the 1920s. The fact that the train carriages were segregated, then the toilets, made me verbally say, “WTF”.

👍🏽 The fact that Morrison’s writing could make me fall in and out of love with characters throughout the book was inspiring. I loved Sula in the beginning and admired her confidence and aura, but by the end, I had accepted her fate and longed for her misfortune.

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet and I have previously written joint reviews for James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light.

Balsam Karam, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Text, translated fiction, women in translation

‘The Singularity’ by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel)

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Text Publishing; 208 pages; 2024. Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley.

The Singularity is a hypnotically powerful novel about the strength of a mother’s love for her missing teenage daughter. But it’s also a compelling story about what it is like to be displaced and to lose your language, country and identity.

The author, Balsam Karam, is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a child.

Unnamed country

The story is set in an unnamed country, somewhere hot, framed between the mountains, “half desert” and the sea, where tourists come to enjoy the food and the weather, but where many locals live in impoverished conditions.

Most of the action occurs on the corniche, a coastal road in a tourist hot spot, home to cafes, restaurants and a bustling food market. There are glistening skyscrapers and shiny new hotels built next to old buildings covered in bullet holes, evidence that the city was once ravished by war.

In the opening pages, an unnamed woman wanders up and down the corniche, pressing a flyer — “Has anyone seen my daughter? 17 years old, missing since dawn on 1 May. Help me find her, help me get justice” — under the windshield wipers of parked cars.

Later, a woman on a business trip, witnesses the desperate mother throw herself off a cliff and into the water below, making orphans out of her three younger children.

The tale of these two women — the mother who dies by suicide and the woman in town on business — are intertwined.  Their personal backstories echo one another. Both are displaced; both have lost children.

Original style and voice

The Singularity is told in a refreshing style, employing different techniques to tell the story of what it is like to be a refugee, to lose loved ones and to endure racism, poverty and violence on an everyday basis.

It treads some distressing territory — including self-harm, stillbirth and a litany of girls and young women going missing — but it does so in a matter-of-fact way.

The author uses the mother’s three surviving children as a singular chorus to explain the events leading up to their sister’s disappearance. They are fully aware that it is simply history repeating: years earlier a cousin disappeared who has never been found, a loss that reverberates across the generations.

The grim subject matter is made bearable by the delicacy of the prose and the compelling voices.  It’s a deeply human story set everywhere and nowhere, and because of that it strikes a universal tone: these losses and disappearances play out all across the world, every day, causing immeasurable heartache and trauma.

Admirers of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail will find much to like here.

This is the author’s first novel to be translated into English; let’s hope her debut novel, Event Horizon, published in 2018, gets translated soon.

The Singularity was nominated for Sweden’s prestigious August Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 European Union Prize for Literature. It has been published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Text Publishing is an Australian independent press based in Melbourne. It publishes a broad range of fiction and non-fiction. It has been awarded the ABIA Small Publisher of the Year three times and won the Leading Edge Books Small Publisher of the Year in 2018 and 2019. You can find out more about them here.

Australia, Author, Book review, Eugen Bacon, Fiction, literary fiction

‘Serengotti’ by Eugen Bacon

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 288 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Eugen Bacon’s Serengotti is a rare and unique novel.

The author is African-Australian and her writing marries the rhythm, colour and folklore of her native Tanzania with Melbourne’s sporting obsessions, Aussie slang and dry wit. The result is an intriguing cultural mix.

The narrative is fluid — it moves from black comedy to surrealist adventure to a love story to a murder mystery, and back again — making it hard to pin down. Nor does it follow a traditional structure.

Even the prose style — often disjointed, littered with wisecracks and full of “colourful” language — coupled with the use of a second-person point of view, gives the book a fresh and original edge. Suffice it to say, I’ve never read an Australian novel quite like it.

Distinctive protagonist

The central character is as distinctive as the story. Ch’anzu is 39, open-gendered (pronouns are zie/hir), wears a nose ring and has a box-cut hairstyle. On the same day zie loses hir presumably lucrative job as a computer programmer (how else could zie afford to live in a swanky apartment on Melbourne’s St Kilda Road?), Ch’anzu finds hir girlfriend Scarlet in a bed with a man and sends her packing.

Then Ch’anzu’s twin brother, Tex, starts harassing her by leaving drunken voicemails and text messages, claiming he’s broken up with his own girlfriend and could Ch’anzu lend him “some dosh?”

Ch’anzu is downhearted, feeling sorry for hirself (“God, it hurts”) and yearns to “pull on hiking boots, sling on a backpack, go away and not come back for six, ten years”.

You feel as though your whole life you’ve missed the train, like you should be somewhere you’re not. Nothing is sound. You’re like a kid whimpering at Burgerland, I said a double whammy with no onions or mayonnaise! The attendant saying, Sorry, kiddo! And you’re still stuck with stinkers and mayo. (page 37)

But then a job opportunity building a community health app in Wagga Wagga (“say it twice”) comes up and zie applies.

A woman with the kindliest voice calls back – it’s like talking to a friend. She’s wearing an accent you can’t place. Valarie, she introduces herself. ‘What do you know about black people?’
‘Yikes. Isn’t that like a bit —?’
‘Politically incorrect? You could say, but not really.’
‘Then I’m black. Afrocentric.’
‘Great!’ she says. ‘Job’s yours if you’ll take it.’
‘Just like that?’
‘What more is there? We love your CV.’
‘Do I get a company car?’
‘You don’t need one in Serengotti.’
‘Zie/hir,’ you say.
‘I beg yours?”
‘My pronouns are zie/hir.’
‘You can take whatever pronouns you like, dear, as long as you can code.’ (page 39)

Life at Serengotti

And so that’s how Ch’anzu moves about 500km north (on the Victoria/NSW border) to Serengotti, a (fictional) migrant African outpost in rural Australia, which recreates an African village, complete with a beauty salon, healing centre, restaurant and supermarket.

Many of the residents are deeply traumatised, having escaped war and violence of their homelands, or, as Valarie puts it:

“Hitler wasn’t the last zealot enacting a vision of ethnic cleansing. And you’d think people would learn from Bosnia. Rwanda. Liberia.” She spits her disdain on the ground. “The things people do for diamonds.” (page 94)

In Serengotti, Ch’anzu reconnects with elements of hir African culture — the cultural rituals, the folklore and superstitions, the food and drink — but zie also understands zie’s an outsider, and when mysterious things begin to happen in the village, Ch’anzu knows zie’ll be blamed for bringing bad luck with hir.

The book takes a suspenseful turn toward the end, when the (creepy, unbalanced) first-person voice of Ch’anzu’s brother Tex acts as an interlocutor, suggesting he’s committed a terrible crime and justifying his reasons for doing so.

It’s Ch’anzu’s charismatic Aunt Maé who offers emotional support, hard-won wisdom and kick-ass advice, and the story ends on a hopeful note, with Ch’anzu realising that losing hir Melbourne job and girlfriend Scarlet were “the earthquake I needed”:

“I was getting complacent and had to plummet into a volcano. But I’ve taught myself to believe, to haul myself out of terrible situations, and thrive.” (page 260)

For reviews that are more eloquent than mine, please see Bill’s at The Australian Legend and Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Transit Lounge is an Australian independent press based in Melbourne. It publishes both fiction and non-fiction and has a particular interest “in creative literary publishing that explores the relationships between East and West and entertains and promotes insights into diverse cultures”. You can find out more about them here.

Author, Book review, Bruno Lloret, Chile, Fiction, Giramondo Publishing, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘Nancy’ by Bruno Lloret (translated by Ellen Jones)

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The cover of X by Bruce Lloret

Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 144 pages; 2020. Translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones.

It’s widely acknowledged that the letter X holds a special place in Elon Musk’s heart (assuming he has one). There’s SpaceX, Tesla’s Model X and the social media channel X (formerly known as Twitter). He even has a child named X AE A-XII, known as “X” for short.

The letter X is also popular with Chilean author Bruno Lloret if his debut novel, Nancy, is anything to go by.

First published in Chile in 2015 and translated into English by Ellen Jones in 2020, this striking novella uses X as literary “decoration” and a form of punctuation designed to slow the reader down, to force us to find the words amongst the proliferation of crosses and to contemplate them in a more regarded way.

The blurb on the back of the book, suggests X can be read “as multiplication symbols, scars, locations on a map, or as signs of erasure and the approach of death”.

To show you how the author uses the letter, here’s a relatively extreme example (from page 6) — not all the pages are as heavily marked as this:

Initially, this might seem visually intrusive to the reading experience — it’s certainly unconventional — but if you’re prepared to give it a try, you’re in for a real treat: Nancy is a beautiful and bittersweet novella about a woman looking back on her troubled life, and can easily be read in one sitting.

Looking back

Nancy is a widow who is dying of cancer. As she confronts her mortality, she reflects on her life and relationships, including her marriage to a “gringo”, who died in a tragic industrial accident, and her childhood and difficult adolescence in northern Chile.

Her teenage years were marred by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the unexplained disappearance of her beloved older brother, Pato — whom she describes as a “superhero” — outside a nightclub when he was 19 years old.

Basically left to fend for herself, Nancy keeps house for her father and her alcoholic uncle Aarón who moves in with them. She goes to school in the morning and spends her afternoons secretly swimming with friends at Playa Roja under the watchful eyes of a group of creepy old gringos. This is despite her father’s decree that she never leave the house (except to go to school) for fear something might happen to her.

He told me that the bodies of women had been showing up on the beach. Some of them washed in by the waves, others just buried up to their necks in the sand, their heads blue in the open air X Five had shown up that week alone X It’s best if you stay home, Nancy. You’re pretty, and we’ve no idea who’s behind it X (page 34)

Cover image of the Two Lines Press edition
Two Lines Press edition

Courage and determination

Against this background of endemic violence and the threat of being “disappeared”, Nancy’s father discovers religion when two young Morman missionaries come knocking at the door. Eventually, Nancy, who is a non-believer and sexually active (she loses her virginity to a gipsy called Jesulé, whom she adores), is also baptised into the Church of Latter Day Saints — even though her heart is not in it.

When she unwittingly stumbles upon the two young male missionaries locked in an amorous embrace, she films them for potential blackmailing purposes. This is but one example of Nancy’s canny way of holding power in a world that largely denies her this control.

The most striking thing about the story, however, is Nancy’s sexual agency and streetwise view of the world, her unwavering commitment to her father (even though he doesn’t always treat her kindly) and her quiet determination to just get on with things. “Feeling sad won’t change anything,” she claims (page 30)

Nancy is a sensitively told tale of living life in the margins against a backdrop of death and violence. It explores themes of trauma, identity, religion and the search for meaning, yet despite the oppressive nature of the narrator’s life, it feels empowering and optimistic.

Lisa from ANZLitLovers has also reviewed it.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Giramondo Publishing is fast becoming my favourite indie press. It’s an Australian university-based publisher, which was founded in 1995 “to publish innovative and adventurous literary work that might not otherwise find publication because of its subtle commercial appeal”. You can find out more about them here.

Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Natalia Ginzburg, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Valentino’ by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Avril Bardoni)

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 80 pages; 2023. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni.

What is it to be a “man of consequence”? And what happens if you don’t live up to that descriptor?

This is the focus of Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, the tale of a much-doted-upon son who fails to live up to his parents’ expectations.

The titular Valentino, the only son of a retired school teacher, is lazy, vain and selfish. But there’s more to his story than meets the eye, and what is left unsaid in this carefully crafted novella, first published in 1957, is almost more important than what is.

A man of consequence

Valentino’s family has made many sacrifices to ensure he can go to medical school and buy all the necessary books and equipment to support his studies. When his father proudly states that this will make his son a “man of consequence”, what he really means is that he is counting on Valentino to lift them out of poverty and boost their social standing.

So it’s somewhat of a shock when Valentino finds a shortcut to riches by announcing he is betrothed to a wealthy older woman called Maddalena. The family are upset because they believe Valentino is getting married for the wrong reasons.

‘That woman is as ugly as sin,’ said my mother quietly. ‘She’s grotesque, Valentino. And since she boasts about being wealthy, everyone will assume that you are marrying her for her money. That’s what we think too, Valentino, because we cannot believe that you are in love with her, you who always used to chase the pretty girls, none of whom was ever pretty enough for you. Nothing like this has ever happened in our family before; not one of us has ever done anything just for money.” (page 11)

His older sister, Clara — who is married with three young children — is so angry about the situation, she calls him a dog under her breath.

But despite his family’s opposition, Valentino can’t see what the problem is — he thinks Maddalena “has lovely black eyes and the bearing of a lady”.

He was bored of all those pretty girls with nothing to talk about, while with Maddalena he could talk about books and a hundred other things. He wasn’t marrying her for her money; he was no pig. (page 12)

He settles into his new married life as if he were born into it and is at ease among Maddalena’s wealthy friends as he is his own family.

A caring daughter-in-law

And while his parents struggle to readjust — his father has a debt hanging over his head because he took out a loan to ensure the family was suitably attired at Valentino’s wedding — Maddalena proves to be a caring and thoughtful daughter-in-law.

When she finds out that Clara’s young son is sick, she arranges costly medical care for him. Later, she offers lodgings to Valentino’s younger sister Catarina, so that she can continue her teacher training studies. And all the while she runs her busy agricultural interests, continues to pay for Valentino’s long-dragged-out (neglected) medical studies, buys him lavish clothes, and bears him three sons.

But she keeps him at arm’s length and soon the quarrels start, where she accuses him of being a “layabout and a failure”.

Sister’s perspective

It is through Catarina’s eyes that we see how events unfold. She’s the put-upon daughter who looks after her parents and gives up any hope of finding a husband of her own. But as much as she’s disappointed by Valentino — she constantly worries that he’s not devoted to his studies and will fail his exams — she still loves him very much.

Without wishing to reveal plot spoilers, the story is neatly, and shockingly, upended in quite a profoundly unexpected way.

It’s a delicious treat of a book, written in Ginzburg’s typically understated but direct style. She’s so perceptive about family life, human behaviour and societal expectations, and every page offers up something frank and forthright. And she’s adroit at mixing the bittersweet with the poignant, with a dash of Italian fury thrown in for good measure.

Claire at Word by Word has also just reviewed this.

I have previously reviewed Giznburg’s All Our Yesterdays and The Dry Heart.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Daunt Books Publishing, which was founded in 2010, grew out of Daunt Books, an independent chain of bookshops in London and the South-East of the UK. You can find out more about them here.