Tag: American literature

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.

Book review, Chatto & Windus, Emma Cline, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘The Guest’ by Emma Cline

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Fiction – paperback; Chatto & Windus; 293 pages; 2023.

Manipulators and con artists make great fodder for novels. Think Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley or Abel Magwitch in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Even Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby could be seen to engage in various forms of deception and manipulation in his pursuit of wealth and status.

Emma Cline offers up an unlikely grifter in her novel The Guest, which tells the story of a 22-year-old woman charming her way through a summer on Long Island while on the run from a man to whom she owes a lot of money.

Alex is an escort from “the city” (presumably New York) and she’s stolen an unspecified amount of money from a client because she’s behind on her rent.

The client, Dom, keeps sending her menacing text messages and angry voicemails, and Alex, knowing she’s not able to pay anything back, grabs the first lifeline that is thrown her way: she moves into a luxurious summerhouse in the Hamptons with Simon, a wealthy man 30 years her senior, after he invites her to spend August there with him.

Simon’s house out east was near enough to the ocean. The living room ceiling was twenty feet high, cut with beams. A polished concrete floor. Big paintings that, by pure dint of their square footage, implied high value. (page 17)

The party’s over

But things don’t go according to plan. When Alex embarrasses Simon at a party, she’s escorted to the train station with a one-way ticket back to the city. She never uses the pass. Instead, she hangs about the island for the next five days, passing the time before she can attend Simon’s Labor Day party. There, in a desperate eleventh-hour attempt, she plans to rescue their “relationship” and live a happily ever after existence.

The party was only a few days away. This was just a waiting period for Simon to cool off, a pause. Then everything would go back to the way it was. (page 99)

It’s during those five tremulous days that Alex inveigles her way into other people’s lives, using deception, trickery, manipulation and a pretty smile to get what she wants (usually food and accommodation).

She attends house parties, pool parties, goes to the beach, hooks up with a teenage boy, takes drugs, breaks into other people’s homes and all the while she desperately tries to ignore her malfunctioning mobile phone which buzzes with reminders that she has a debt to pay.

The art of grifting

It’s a high-wire act that works — up to a point. When she pushes people’s generosity too far, she risks exposing her true self: a desperate young woman who uses others to satisfy her own needs.

“And who did you say you knew? ‘Cause none of us” — the girl gestured around the room — “remember you.”
“Brian,” Alex said. “He invited me.”
“Brian?” The girl on the couch shook her head. “Fine, okay, Brian. What’s Brian’s last name?” (page 84)

Her impoverishment and desperation are in stark contrast to the upper-class wealth that surrounds her: the swimming pools and spas, the flashy houses, the grand gardens and the impressive seaside views.

Her vulnerability, coupled with her audacious, calculating, living-by-her-wits behaviour, makes her an engaging character, someone to cheer on even if her morals might be dubious. But as she builds her fragile house of cards, you keep turning the pages, waiting for the inevitable collapse.

Page-turning read

The plot, which is suspenseful and heart-hammering, moves along at a clip. Will Alex slip up? Will she do or say the wrong thing? Will Dom, whose menacing messages keep coming, finally track her down and violently extract the money he’s owed?

The story is written in almost old-fashioned third-person prose reminiscent of Richard Yates, who’s known for his precise and unsparing portrayals of suburban life, and Richard Ford, who focuses on the struggles and personal failures of ordinary Americans.

Cline’s writing, filled with the complexity and nuance of human behaviour, is cut from a similar cloth. She withholds judgement of her characters and their actions, allowing the reader to empathise and come to their own conclusions.

The Guest was featured on several bloggers’ end-of-year lists in 2023, so when I saw it on the shelves of my local library I borrowed it. I’m glad I did. I loved the way it contrasted the extravagant lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy with Alex’s seedier hand-to-mouth existence.

It’s a terrific fast-paced read but offers a lot to cogitate on — including the ending, which I’m still thinking about more than a week later.

Guy at His Futile Preoccupations has also reviewed it.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Richard Ford, Setting, USA

‘Wildlife’ by Richard Ford

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Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 159 pages;  2018.

Richard Ford’s Wildlife is a beguiling novella told from the perspective of a teenage boy, Joe Brinson, whose parents are going through a little “bump” in their marriage and behave in unfathomable and self-destructive ways.

The opening paragraph sets the scene:

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom, and my father had brought us there in the spring of that year from Lewiston, Idaho, in the belief that people — small people like him — were making money in Montana or soon would be, and he wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.

But the luck runs out quickly, when, first, Joe’s father, Jerry, is dramatically fired from his job as a golf instructor at the local country club, and two, a wildfire in the nearby Rocky Mountains casts a pall of smoke over the entire town and doesn’t look like it will be extinguished any time soon.

Instead of looking for a new job, Jerry joins a local volunteer crew fighting the fire, leaving his small family behind, almost as if he’s using the escapade to avoid confronting the reality of his own crumbling marriage and dissatisfaction with his life.

Meanwhile, Joe’s mother, Jean, who has been unable to find work as a substitute teacher or bookkeeper since moving to Montana, is angry at her husband because she thinks he is ill-equipped for firefighting and is putting his life in danger for no good reason. “This is a stupid idea,” she tells him.

Yet no sooner has her husband headed off to do his community-minded duty, than Jean’s jumping into bed with Warren Miller, an older man who is rich, influential and owns two local grain elevators. But because the story is filtered through Joe’s eyes, it’s hard to tell whether his mother is using Miller to get a job at his company, or whether she’s just looking for a romantic interlude while her husband is away.

Human drama

A lot happens in this novella, which condenses most of the action in just a few short days, using pared-back language and short, active sentences. Yet somehow the book brims with emotion. It feels like a lifetime of living, loving, pain and misunderstanding are played out in this one short period.

And Joe’s confusion, his inability to understand his parents’ behaviour and actions, bring him up short. He’s sensitive, confused and doesn’t quite know whose side to take, especially when both Jerry and Jean drag him into their dramas.

When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again — which is a loss. But to shield yourself — as I didn’t do — seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

Yet the self-destructive behaviour and the deliberate wilfulness of both parties doesn’t seem entirely believable. It’s almost as if both Joe’s mother and his father lose their minds momentarily and live out their individual fantasies — his of macho “escape”, hers of sexual wantonness — with no regard for the consequences.

Gripping narrative

Despite these misgivings, the story is a gripping one. It’s fast-paced, full of narrative tension and suspense, and looming over it all is the threat of a natural disaster that puts the Brinson’s drama into perspective.

Ford paints an evocative picture of Montana Falls — “you could see mountains on clear days from the streets of town” — and the wildfire threat that rumbles on for months at a time, casting a haze so you could “sometimes not see the mountains or where the land met the sky”.

Wildlife is essentially a coming-of-age tale, one that uses the metaphor of an uncontrollable fire to explain how some people live their lives. It’s both bittersweet and explosive.

The book was first published in 1990, and it was adapted for the screen in 2018.

I read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

Author, Bonnie Garmus, Book review, Doubleday, Fiction, general, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Lessons in Chemistry’ by Bonnie Garmus

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Fiction – paperback; Doubleday; 390pp; 2022.

I tend to avoid over-hyped books, particularly if they clutter up my social media feeds, which is why I had decided, rightly or wrongly, that Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry was NOT A BOOK FOR ME. (Yes, the capital letters are important.)

And then I saw Brona’s persuasive review and borrowed the book from the library. I ate it up in a couple of days and realised I’d been wrong to cast judgement based on over-exposure to other people’s enthusiasm when I hadn’t even read the novel myself.

It’s a compelling, fast-paced story set in 1950s America about a female chemist who falls in love with another chemist but because he is famous and successful everyone assumes she’s riding on his coattails. Later, when she accidentally falls pregnant, she is sacked. After the birth of her daughter, she reinvents herself as a TV chef, who inspires women across America to find their true calling and pursue it.

Unfortunately, it wears its feminist agenda too heavily on its sleeve (it’s written with a modern mindset that would have been out of place at the time the book is set) and features some irritating quirky elements, such as an anthropomorphised dog and a precocious, super-intelligent child, but I had a fun time reading it anyway. It’s an enjoyable romp, full of comic moments, great characters and a delightful plot, the type of book to get you out of a reading slump or keep you company on a rainy day.

And yet, it deals with some dark subject matter, including the theft of women’s academic work and systematic misogyny, rape and sexual assault (in the workplace), but it never dwells on these: they are presented as fait accompli, just something that the average woman in 1950s America has to put up with if she flouts societal obligations and expectations, which are limited to running a home and raising children.

[…] she only ever seemed to bring out the worst in men. They either wanted to control her, touch her, dominate her, silence her, correct her, or tell her what to do. She didn’t understand why they couldn’t just treat her as a fellow human being, as a colleague, a friend, an equal, or even a stranger on the street, someone to whom one is automatically respectful until you find out they’ve buried a bunch of bodies in the backyard.

Along with the constant commentary about how difficult it is for women — in this case lead character Elizabeth Zott — to be taken seriously outside of the home, it’s littered with witty one-liners to add a level of “sass” and impudence (which I, for one, appreciated). Here’s an example:

Like so many undesirable men, Mr Sloane truly believed other women found him attractive. Harriet [his wife] had no idea where that specific brand of self-confidence came from. Because while stupid people may not know they’re stupid because they’re stupid, surely unattractive people must know they’re unattractive because of mirrors.

The word that best springs to mind to describe Lessons in Chemistry is “hyperreal”. Everything seems slightly exaggerated – the dialogue, the tone of voice, the setting, and the ridiculous nature of the TV cooking show hosted by a woman who uses chemical names for ingredients.

It feels like something dreamed up by author Anne Tyler, the creator of the period drama series Mad Men and film-maker Wes Anderson. But it’s a winning combination. I can’t wait for the TV adaptation coming later this year…

Author, Book review, Decolonise your bookshelves, Fiction, James Baldwin, literary fiction, New York, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, USA

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ by James Baldwin

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 192 pages; 1994.

First published in 1974, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk is set in Harlem in the 1970s. It is essentially a love story between 19-year-old Tish and 21-year-old Fonny — but there’s a twist: Tish is pregnant and Fonny, a sculptor, is now in jail, falsely accused of raping a “Porto Rican”.

How their respective families deal with the situation — Tish’s family is positive and supportive; Fonny’s is less so — and the ways in which the couple hang onto their love forms the heart of the story.

The book is listed in ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which I reviewed earlier in the year. I bought a copy for Monet, my 18-year-old, Melbourne-based niece, because I thought it might be something she would like. I had already spotted If Beale Street Could Talk on her bookshelves when I visited in early March (and she kindly decamped to her sister’s room to let me stay in hers).

Together, we thought it might be fun to read some of the books from This is the Canon and write joint reviews on an ad-hoc basis following a simple format.

This is the Canon describes If Beale Street Could Talk as “one of America’s classic urban love stories”, adding:

The backdrop of institutionalized racism in a pre-Black Lives Matter world, and the mistreatment of Black men by the police and authorities makes their lives bleak; they [Tish and Fonny] often feel beaten before they have barely started living. The fact that a disproportionate number of young Black males in the West are stopped on a daily basis by the police for something as simple as walking along the street, makes this story immediately universal and painfully current.

My thoughts

👍🏽 I really loved this story. It’s quick and easy to read but leaves a lasting impression. And it feels totally modern, even though it was written almost half a century ago! I loved the sparkling and witty dialogue, the frank confessions of Tish as first-person narrator and the wonder with which she sees the world.

👍🏽 It is so joyful in places, not just in the love between the two main characters but in the love that Tish’s immediate family show her when she reveals her pregnancy. Here’s what her mother tells her when she finds out her unwed daughter is going to have a baby:

“Tish,’ she said, ‘when we was first brought here, the white man he didn’t give us no preachers to say words over us before we had our babies. And you and Fonny be together right now, married or not, wasn’t, wasn’t for that same damn white man. So, let me tell you what you got to do. You got to think about that baby. You got to hold on to that baby, don’t care what else happens or don’t happen. You got to do that. Can’t nobody else do that for you. And the rest of us, well, we going to hold on to you. And we going to get Fonny out. Don’t you worry. I know it’s hard – but don’t you worry. And that baby be the best thing that ever happened to Fonny. He needs that baby. It going to give him a whole lot of courage.’

👎🏽 The language is a bit confrontational in places. The ‘n’ word is used a lot (the context has obviously changed in the time since the novel was first published) but there’s also a bit of swearing that might feel jarring if you don’t use this kind of language yourself.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽  I really enjoyed how much personality and soul the book had, and how that allowed me as a reader to gain such an attachment to the protagonists Tish and Fonny. The way the book was written and the perspective it offered pushed me to care so much about the characters that I ended up sympathising and feeling their emotions, especially that of Tish.

👍🏽 The writing style was super accessible, especially for a relatively new reader of the classics. The novel dealt with themes of racism, justice and prejudice, which were really eye-opening. They are definitely themes I would like to read about more in the future, whether through Baldwin’s other works or just in general modern classics.

👎🏽 The ending was too open-ended and sort of up for interpretation, leaving the story feeling unfinished. I would’ve loved a bit more clarity to the symbolism and things mentioned towards the end (no spoilers, haha).

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We chose this book to read from ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which focuses on fiction produced by writers of African descent, Asian descent and Indigenous Peoples. It’s written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay George.

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Sigrid Nunez, USA, Virago

‘A Feather on the Breath of God’ by Sigrid Nunez

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Fiction – paperback; Virago Press; 192 pages; 2021.

If America is a nation of immigrants, then this debut novella is a quintessential American story.

A Feather on the Breath of God, by Sigrid Nunez, was first published in 1995. It’s framed around an American woman looking back on the lives of her working-class immigrant parents and includes aspects of her own struggle with identity as a multiracial person.

The novella is structured in four parts — the story of the narrator’s Chinese father, the story of her German mother, her own life as a ballerina, and her love affair with a Russian immigrant — each of which could be read as a standalone story in its own right. (This is not to say there’s no overarching thread tying everything together, for there is, and that comes in the first-person narrator telling the story, but the overall narrative feels slightly disjointed.)

An unlikely partnership

Both the first part, Chang, and the second part, Christa, are detailed pen portraits of two very different people.

Chang is a quiet, introverted man, who was born in 1911 in Panama of Chinese parentage, and despite more than 30 years in America has never quite mastered English. His wife, the narrator’s mother, is the complete opposite. She’s loud, confident, speaks excellent, if heavily accented, English, and is proudly German.

The pair met shortly after the end of the Second World War when Chang was stationed in a small southern  German town (he had been drafted into the US Army and saw action in France and Germany). He was 34 and Christa was 18. In 1948 they settled in the US, where they set up home in the housing projects of New York, and had three daughters, two of them born out of wedlock.

Their relationship is complex and fraught. The narrator does not understand either parent, or their marriage, but in looking back at their lives she begins to empathise with their situations, their struggles and the ways in which their different backgrounds came to shape their personalities and, in turn, her own identity.

By putting herself in her father’s shoes, for instance, she begins to see how life as a father of three American daughters must have been for him:

We must have seemed as alien to him as he seemed to us. To him we must have been “others”. Females. Demons. No different from other demons, who could not tell one Asian from another, who thought Chinese food meant chop suey and Chinese customs were matter for joking. I would have to live a lot longer and he would have to die before the full horror of this would sink in. And then it would sink in deeply, agonizingly, like an arrow that has found its mark.

There are similar revelations about her mother, who refuses to apologise for being German despite the atrocities of the Nazis coming to light:

It was not to be hoped that any American — let alone an American child — could grasp what this unique quality of being German was all about. I don’t recall how old I was, but at some point, I had to wonder: If you took that quality away from her, what would have replaced it? What sort of person might she have been? But her Germanness and her longing for Germany — her Heimweh — were so much a part of her she cannot be thought of without them. To try to imagine her born of other blood, on other soil, is to lose her completely. There is no Christa there.

Forging your own life

The second half of the novella explores the narrator’s own life. As a ballerina, the goal was to be as light as “a feather on the breath of God” (hence the book’s title), which meant constantly starving herself. This is a direct contravention of her childhood, in which her mother, brought up during the war, insists everyone eat every little morsel on their plate.

I was never thin. Not even at ninety pounds. To see how long I could go without solid food (up to five days) was a favorite game. How beautiful the hollowed gut, the jutting bones.

Later, as a teacher of English as a second language, she embarks on an illicit affair with a married Russian student who has a shady past but is dedicated to learning the language. This reminds her that love and language are intertwined, furthering her inability to comprehend how her parents ever communicated with one another.

Whenever I praise his English he says: “I did it for you.” Not the whole truth, of course, but it cannot be denied: he studied hard for me.
“My dear, can I say, ‘I dote on you’? Is it correct?” “Can I say, ‘I adore you’?” “I search my dictionary for ways to tell you.”
My heart runs out of me.
In all those years, my father never learned enough English to tell me how he felt about me.

A Feather on the Breath of God is an intriguing story of immigrants struggling to adapt to a new culture and a new way of life as seen through the eyes of their youngest daughter.

As a tale about personal identity — specifically how much of it is shaped by our ethnicity and cultural upbringing — it is unwavering in its lack of sentiment. It’s bold and brave and compelling.

I have reviewed several books by Sigrid Nunez in recent years. You can see all my reviews here.

I read this book for Novellas in November (#NovNov22) hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2022), Algeria, Author, Book review, Fiction, Flamingo, literary fiction, Morocco, Paul Bowles, Publisher, Setting

‘The Sheltering Sky’ by Paul Bowles

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Fiction – paperback; Flamingo Modern Classic; 285 pages; 1993.

First published in 1949, The Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles‘ (1910-1999) debut novel.

It’s a rather enigmatic tale about a young American couple travelling through French North Africa after the Second World War, but what begins as a typical story (albeit in an atypical setting) of a marriage on the rocks morphs into something else entirely.

Part horror, part suspense (part WTF is going on?), it’s a chilling tale about strangers in a strange land and the unforeseen fates that can await the naive traveller.

On the move

The story goes something like this. Port and Kit Moresby*, a sophisticated American couple from New York, are exploring Morocco and Algeria with their friend Tunner. They don’t have a proper itinerary, they simply move from place to place when they feel like a change of scenery because, as Port puts it, they are not tourists but travellers:

The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to the other. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. Before the war, it had been Europe and the Near East, during the war the West Indies and South America. And she had accompanied him without reiterating her complaints too often or too bitterly.

But while the trio take their time moving around the country —  this Google Map I found online helpfully charts their journey — there are tensions at play.

In the opening chapters, for instance, Port spends a night with a local prostitute (a pattern that repeats throughout the novel) and puts himself in danger of being robbed or mugged.

Later, when the trio meet a young Australian traveller, Eric, and his mother, Mrs Lyle, a travel writer (whose vile views on Arabs and Jews make for uncomfortable reading), staying at the same hotel, they are offered a ride to Boucif by car. Port accepts, but Kit and Tunner go by train because there’s not enough room for all of them in the vehicle. It is during this long train journey that Tunner makes a pass at his friend, setting into motion a convoluted love triangle in which Kit constantly plays off her lover with her husband.

Port, who has his suspicions about his wife’s trysts, engineers it so that Eric gives Tunner a lift to the next city on the pretext that Kit and Port will catch him up in a few days. This is where things get tricky. Port’s passport is stolen and it’s dangerous to be a foreigner with no identifying papers. It’s also dangerous to be on the road during an outbreak of meningitis, and when Port falls sick on a long bus journey the sense of danger becomes even more heightened.

Strong sense of place

All the while the Saharan landscape and her ancient cities form an exotic backdrop in which the characters play out their petty dramas which quickly escalate to become life or death situations.

The writing is eloquent, spare and incisive, featuring authentic, animated dialogue and rich, vivid descriptions of place. Here’s how Bowles describes Aïn Krorfa, in Algeria, for instance:

Aïn Krorfa was beginning to waken from its daily sun-drugged stupor. Behind the fort, which stood near the mosque on a high rocky hill that rose in the very middle of the town, the streets became informal, there were vestiges of the original haphazard design of the native quarter. In the stalls, whose angry lamps had already begun to gutter and flare, in the open cafes where the hashish smoke hung in the air, even in the dust of the hidden palm-bordered lanes, men squatted, fanning little fires, bringing their tin vessels of water to boil, making their tea, drinking it.

But despite the wide-open spaces of the desert and the abundance of sunshine and stark light, the mood of the book soon becomes oppressive, heavy, fearful. The characters, especially Kit, behave in unexpected, not always sensible, ways, and it’s difficult to predict what might happen next.

I’ve refrained from going into the plot in too much detail, but it does take a dark turn somewhere around the halfway point when Port develops a terrible fever and the hotel in which they planned to stay refuses to take them in. Kit is suddenly forced to take action, to look after her sick husband and try to find medical help without drawing the ire of the authorities who won’t look favourably on foreigners without ID.

The final part of the story slides into a kind of farce in the sense that I found it a little hard to believe, but on the whole, The Sheltering Sky is a strange yet beguiling read — and one I won’t forget in a hurry.

* Call me childish, but there’s something funny about naming a character Port Moresby when we all know that’s the name of the capital city of Papua New Guinea. LOL.

This is my 2nd book for #20booksofsummer 2022 edition. I bought it secondhand for $11.50 from Elizabeth’s Bookshop here in Fremantle in August 2020. I had previously read his 1966 novel Up Above the World which I had described as a “masterpiece of suspense writing”.

2022 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Adam Kay, Author, Book review, Fiction, Grove Press, historical fiction, Jan Carson, Lily King, literary fiction, Literary prizes, memoir, New Guinea, Non-fiction, Northern Ireland, Pan Books, Publisher, Setting, Transworld Digital, UK

Three Quick Reviews: Jan Carson, Adam Kay & Lily King

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I’m a bit behind in my reviewing, so here’s a quick round-up of books I have recently read. This trio comprises an Irish “supernatural” story, a medical memoir from the UK and a historical novel by an American writer. They have been reviewed in alphabetical order by author’s surname.

‘The Raptures’ by Jan Carson

Fiction – Kindle edition; Transworld Digital; 332 pages; 2022.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award, Jan Carson’s The Raptures is an unusual tale about a mysterious illness that spreads through a group of children from the same village, killing them one by one. But one young girl, Hannah Adger, remains healthy, the sole survivor of her entire classroom. Scared and haunted by survivor’s guilt, Hannah, who is from an evangelical Protestant family, discovers she can see and communicate with her dead friends.

Set in Ulster in 1993 during The Troubles, the illness that sweeps the small community is a metaphor for a war that rages on with seemingly no end in sight. As the children fall prey to the mystery illness, the community is brought together by a desire to end the disease that is killing its loved ones — but many families get caught up in the fear and the anger of an out-of-control plague and look for someone to blame, contributing to the divisions in an already divided community.

Admittedly, I struggled a little with this book. The structure, repetitive and predictable, quickly wore thin and I found the supernatural elements hard to believe. Ditto for the explanation of what caused the illness (which I guessed long before it was revealed). Perhaps it didn’t help that I had Covid-19 when I read the tale, so I wasn’t in the mood for reading about sick people dying. But as a treatise on religion, grief and faith, The Raptures is an unusual — and unique — read.

‘This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor’ by Adam Kay

Non-fiction – memoir; Pan Macmillan; 256 pages; 2018.

One of the best things about living in the UK (which I did between 1998-2019) was the free medical treatment I was able to access under the National Health Service (NHS), a centrally funded universal healthcare system, free at the point of delivery. But the system is not perfect and is chronically underfunded and overstretched. Adam Kay’s memoir of his time working in the NHS as a junior doctor highlights what it is like to work on the front line, where every decision you make has life and death implications for the people under your care.

Written in diary form over the course of several years, This is Going to Hurt is a no-holds-barred account of a medical career forged in an overwhelmingly stressful environment dominated by long hours, poor pay and next to no emotional support. But Kay, who has since left the profession to become a stand-up comic, takes a cynical, often sarcastic tone, recounting stories and events — mostly to do with obstetrics and gynaecology, the areas in which he specialised  — with sharp-edged humour, so I tittered my way through most of the book.

And when I wasn’t laughing, I was crying because it’s so heartbreaking in places. Mind you, it’s nowhere near as dark and oppressive as the recent BBC drama series, which prompted me to read the book.

(Note, I wouldn’t advise anyone who is pregnant or has had a traumatic birth experience to pick it up.)

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King

Fiction – paperback; Grove Press; 288 pages; 2014.

Said to be loosely based on American anthropologist Margaret Mead’s time spent researching tribes in New Guinea in the 1940s, Euphoria is a story about a love triangle set in the jungle. It’s the first time I’ve ever read a novel about anthropologists and I found it a fascinating tale about ego, arrogance, academic controversy and desire.

I knew nothing about Mead and her achievements, so I can only judge the book on the power of its storytelling, which I found compelling even if the plot was a little thin. This is essentially a character-driven story — and what characters they are! We meet American Nell Stone, the central character, upon which the others revolve, including her Australian husband Fen, and the couple’s English friend Andrew Bankson.

King paints a convincing portrait of a trio of anthropologists at work, fleshing out each character so that we meet them in the past and the present, understand what drives them, what infuriates them and why they do what they do.

And the setting, including the (fictional) tribes that are described in such vivid detail, imbues the story with a rich sense of atmosphere and realism.

I read ‘The Raptures’ as part of my project to read all the shortlisted titles for the 2022 Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award. 
Anne Tyler, Author, Book review, Chatto & Windus, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘French Braid’ by Anne Tyler

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Fiction – paperback; Chatto & Windus; 256 pages; 2022. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Sometimes a novel just strikes the right mood. You pick it up, start reading and become so immersed in the story you lose all sense of time. Before you know it, you’ve read half the book — or at least made substantial inroads.

This is how I felt when I read Anne Tyler’s latest novel, French Braid.

I am a long-time Anne Tyler fan so it’s no surprise I would like this book, but I reckon it’s the best one she’s written since 1982’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, my favourite Tyler novel. That’s probably because it shares similar traits in terms of its focus on a dysfunctional family and the way chance events shape people’s lives and how sibling relationships are dictated by power dynamics beyond their control.

One family’s story

French Braid charts the history of the Garrett family over several decades — from 1959 through to 2020 — and features all the quintessential trademarks of Tyler’s work: a tapestry of complex family dynamics, a cast of quirky but believable characters, and a Baltimore setting.

There’s no real plot; the character-driven narrative moves ahead in roughly ten-year increments and each chapter is written (in the third person) from the perspective of a particular family member. This allows the reader to get to know the family relatively well, to understand the events that have shaped each person and given rise to certain misunderstandings or lessons or viewpoints.

We witness children growing older, moving out of home, finding partners of their own and having children. The passing of time is marked by graduations, family gatherings, weddings and celebratory dinners and occasions.

It is, at times, poignant and heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny.

A family holiday sets the tone

The family is centred around Robin and Mercy, who get married in 1940, and their children Alice, Lily and David, whose ties and loyalties are tested and divided as they grow up to become adults with lives and families of their own.

A rare family holiday in 1959, when the girls are teens and David is a seven-year-old, underpins the entire family history and sets the tone for everything that follows. What unfolds on that lake in Maryland has long-lasting repercussions. David, in particular, is scarred by Robin’s heavy-handed attempts to force him to go swimming when he’d prefer to play quietly with his toys.

As the years slide by, the Garrett’s marriage comes under strain, not least because Mercy wants the freedom to pursue her ambitions to be a painter. She begins to spend more and more time at the studio she rents nearby, slowly moving her belongings there and staying overnight. Her adult children are under the impression she’s moved out of the family home, but it’s a subject that can’t be broached with their father, who remains devoted to his wife.

It’s the things left unsaid, the uncomfortable truths that remain hidden, which allows the family to muddle on without self-imploding. David’s wife puts it succinctly like this:

This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.

French Braid is completely immersive as we follow the strands of the Garrett’s disparate lives across three generations. It’s tender, wise, knowing and funny. I loved it.