Tag: mothers and daughters

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2021), Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2021, Book review, Cassandra Austin, Fiction, Hamish Hamilton, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Like Mother’ by Cassandra Austin

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Hamish Hamilton; 294 pages; 2021. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

OK. I’m going to make a bold claim here. Cassandra Austin’s Like Mother is the best novel I have read so far this year. It’s literary fiction of the finest order, but it’s got the page-turning quality of a psychological thriller and brims with brilliant characters that feel real enough to step off the page.

The setting is small-town Australia. The year is 1969. And Louise Ashland, a new mother, is at home alone with a crying baby.

The kitchen is agitated. The phone cord sways slightly and the baby’s cries rend the room. Louise hasn’t moved since hanging up. Dust motes sparkle and drift as Lolly’s cries continue to shrill the air and Louise clamps her hands over her ears, not that this helps. What is she doing?

Set entirely in the space of one November day — four months after man first landed on the moon — this fast-paced novel charts what happens to Louise when she realises baby Delores (“Lolly”) has stopped crying but she can’t remember where she put her down. She’s not sleeping in her cot, she’s not in the lounge room, in fact, she doesn’t seem to be anywhere at all.

Three interleaved storylines

Louise’s rising panic and sense of disorientation is undercut by two interlinked narrative threads, that of her over-protective mother, Gladys, who lives nearby, and that of her husband, Steven, a philandering refrigerator salesman who is on the road a lot (his office is an hour’s drive away), unaware that his wife is struggling to adjust to new motherhood.

These separate narrative threads, all told in the third person in alternate chapters, provide an intimate look at three troubled characters, all interdependent on one another yet keeping secrets close to their hearts. A coterie of colourful aunts, a family GP and a friendly policeman, all of whom get caught up in the day’s proceedings, adds to the dramatis personae.

As Louise’s day unfolds in a blur of anxiety and alarm, fending off her mother’s constant phone calls and knocks on the door, Steven is being set up by his young secretary, who knows he’s been having an affair and now wants him to pay her $1,000 to keep her mouth closed.

Meanwhile, Gladys, who is back sleeping with her ex-husband and the local doctor, is worried that her daughter is not only trying to cut her out of the picture but might possibly pose a threat to Lolly. Such dark thoughts, it turns out, are rooted in a tragic event from the past…

Clever structure

Like Mother is a cleverly structured, expertly plotted novel, one where the pace is lightning fast thanks to cliffhangers at the end of every chapter.

The 1960s setting gives it a certain domestic vibe in which women are the homemakers, men are the breadwinners and having mod-cons (such as a refrigerator) is the height of sophistication.

Through this prism, it explores the tense, almost oppressive relationship between a mother and daughter, and what happens when a son-in-law gets in the way.

As layers of the past are slowly peeled back and family secrets are revealed, the story takes on a darker undertone as the truth becomes exposed at the most inopportune time. And while the ending is a happy one, there’s something about the way the threads are tied up that didn’t quite make sense to me.

Still, as a portrait of a new mother under stress (and perhaps losing her mind), it’s a brilliantly rendered account of how tough it can be to hold it all together and to put up a facade when everyone around you is expecting great things.

This one deserves to win awards. I hope it gets shortlisted for many.

This is my 15th book for #AWW2021 and my 11th for #20booksofsummer 2021 edition. I received a review copy of this back in February (the book was published in Australia on 30 March), but it’s taken me a few months to get to it!

Atlantic Books, Author, Book review, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Lives of Women’ by Christine Dwyer Hickey

kimbofo

The-lives-of-women

Fiction – paperback; Atlantic Books; 278 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Christine Dwyer Hickey may possibly be Ireland’s most under-rated writer. She’s written seven novels — I’ve read the oh-so brilliant but heart-breaking Tatty and the inventive award-winning The Cold Eye of Heaven — as well as a short story collection and a (newly published) play.

The Lives of Women, her latest novel, is right up there with my favourite reads of the year so far. It’s the kind of book that hooks you right from the start and then keeps you on tenterhooks throughout. I started reading it on a Sunday morning and then had to make a difficult decision about whether to put it aside to finish my chores and planned errands or to stay indoors and finish it. I chose the latter.

A return from exile

When the book opens we meet Elaine Nicols, a woman in her late 40s, who has returned to her childhood home in suburban Ireland after a long exile in New York. Her mother has recently died — she missed the funeral, deliberately as it turns out — and she needs to make sure her invalid and uncommunicative father and his ageing Alsatian are okay before returning to the States.

One day, while airing the attic, she notices that the house backing on to her father’s has been sold. As its contents begin to pile up in the garden, she keeps “thinking about something that happened more than 30 years ago” which continues to haunt her.

The novel then swings backwards and forwards in time, building up a portrait of a dysfunctional family living in a hotbed of other dysfunctional families on a small suburban housing estate where everyone knows everyone else’s business.

There are constant hints that something tragic happened, which resulted in 16-year-old Elaine being “disowned” by her parents and sent away to live on the other side of the Atlantic with next to no family contact. But what we don’t know is what caused such an extreme parental reaction, and it is this extraordinary build up of suspense that makes The Lives of Women such a page-turner.

Mothers and daughters

While it’s essentially a suspense novel, the tension is not created at the expense of detail or humanity. The author peoples it with believable,  intriguing — if somewhat flawed and troubled  — characters.

She is particularly good at depicting the contradictory relationships between teenage girls — the peer pressure, the gossiping, the bitchiness and the overwhelming desire to fit in and be liked. But it is the fraught relationship between Helen and her over-protective mother that she really excels:

She thinks to herself — tomorrow. I will make an effort tomorrow. I will try to be nice to her. The effort I make will be strong enough to break the grip in my stomach and then I’ll be able to breathe again.
In the early hours of the morning she is filled with hope for tomorrow’s effort. And then the next day, the second — the very second — she sets eyes on her mother queasily coming out of the bathroom and padding down the stairs in her big frilly dressing gown, the laundry basket held high in her arms, empty bottles whispering inside it — she hates, hates, hates her, all over again.

There’s no doubt that Dwyer Hickey is a brilliant stylist, effortlessly switching between third person past and first person present, and there’s something extraordinarily pitch-perfect about the mood she evokes — you feel Elaine’s loneliness, her confusion, her terrible need for redemption — and yet it’s not an overwhelmingly dark book: it’s punctuated by moments of joy and humour and there’s a lyricism in the writing that carries the novel into the light.

But don’t take my word for it: Susan Osborne, who blogs at a Life in Books, also loved it — you can read her review here. And you can read more about the author by visiting her official website. Personally, I’d love to see this one on the Man Booker Prize long list, which is announced tomorrow… but I won’t hold my breath.

UPDATE: Well, surprise, surprise, this book didn’t get long listed for the Booker — but here’s hoping it does get listed for Irish Book of the Year later this year. In the meantime, the complete 2015 Man Booker long list is here.

Author, Book review, Doreen Finn, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, New Island, New York, Publisher, Setting

‘My Buried Life’ by Doreen Finn

kimbofo

My-Buried-Life

Fiction – paperback; New Island Books; 254 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Irish writer Doreen Finn’s My Buried Life is a remarkably accomplished, confident and polished debut novel set in Dublin after the economic crash.

A return to Dublin

It tells the story of a New York-based poet and academic in her late 30s who returns to her childhood home after the death of her mother. But Eva Perry, who narrates the story, doesn’t expect to stay long: she simply wants to tidy up her mother’s affairs and head back to her life in Manhattan as quickly as possible.

Yet things are not straightforward, for Eva is nursing deeply felt hurts — she’s recently broken off an affair with a married man, whom she loved — and now all the painful memories of her childhood come rushing back: the complicated relationship she had with her estranged mother, the unexplained death of her father when she was just four years old and then the depression and suicide of her older brother when she was 16.

And then there’s the ongoing problem she has with alcohol:

I want to stop drinking again. I can’t keep on doing what I’ve been doing since I got back to Dublin. I can’t live a healthy or productive life if my principal objective each day is to count the minutes until I allow myself a drink. It’s starting to show on my face, in my body. […] I don’t want to be that woman, alone with her books and empty bottles. I actually don’t know what I do want, but I don’t want that.

Melancholy, hope and humour

This probably makes My Buried Life sound quite maudlin — I mean, come on, in the first few chapters there’s already been a funeral, a suicide, a confession about alcoholism and a broken love affair  — but Eva is such a fascinating character, and her voice is so heartfelt, honest and often self-deprecating, that the story doesn’t feel as if it is wallowing in the gloom of it all. Instead, the narrative is infused with a well-balanced sense of melancholia but there’s also a slow burning anger at its core, which gives the story a sharp little edge. And the secrets, which are slowly revealed one by one as the story unfolds, make it a particularly compelling read.

It’s very much a book about “home” — where is it if you are an immigrant, what makes it and how it shapes us — and the displacement felt when returning to the place where you grew up after a long time away. I especially loved Eva’s withering commentary about how Dublin had changed —  for the worse — while she’d been gone:

Political discussion on the radio […] washes over me like sea foam, numbing in its repetition. The lies, the accusations, the nonsense about the imploded property market, as though property were the only thing wrong with this country. As though politicians and cute hoors hadn’t been ripping Ireland off in every guise imaginable since the dawn of independence, and now, when they’re still at it, people are somehow required to be surprised, shocked that any of this could have happened. I want to point the finger of blame at them all, the bankers, the politicos, all who allowed this to happen, with their mock shock, their disbelief that this could be happening to Ireland. Poster child for neo-liberal politics. Celtic Tiger indeed.

But this is also a book about second chances (I suspect the Irish economy may well be a metaphor for Eva’s own life) and it’s filled with many tender moments as Eva finds herself becoming intimate with a new circle of friends and lovers. In its exploration of family, loyalty and the secrets that bind us to one another, My Buried Life shows one woman’s struggle to accept her past in order to move into the future. It’s written in lush, almost musical prose, and while it may be Doreen Finn’s first book, I’m pretty sure it won’t be her last…

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Meike Ziervogel, Publisher, Salt Publishing, Setting

‘Clara’s Daughter’ by Meike Ziervogel

kimbofo

Clara's Daughter

Fiction – paperback; Salt Publishing; 133 pages; 2014. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

If you have ever read any translated novellas published by Peirene Press, then Meike Ziervogel* will be a familiar name for she is the founder and publisher of that independent and award-winning London-based company.

Meike is also an accomplished writer, and her first book, Magda, which fictionalised the story of the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, was published by Salt Publishing to critical acclaim last year.  (I am yet to read it.)

Her new book, Clara’s Daughter, explores universal themes focused on love, marriage, growing old and the sometimes complicated relationship between mothers and daughters.

Strained relations

Set in north London, the story revolves around middle-aged businesswoman Michele, who is successful at her job — she loves the “status and illusion of power that it gives” — but is floundering at home. Her children, Felix and Thea, have finally left the nest, and now Michele and her husband, Jim, are forced to confront the reality that they no longer have anything in common after 25 years of marriage.

To complicate matters, Michele’s mother, Clara (of the title), needs looking after — there is talk of placing her in a home, although Michele’s sister, Hilary, doesn’t like the idea. Eventually, Clara is installed in the basement of Michele’s home, but despite sharing a house the two are unable to relax in each other’s company and go to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to communicate.

I hear her turn the key, open the door, close it. For a moment there is silence while she quietly removes her shoes. Then she tiptoes into the kitchen. I hear her take a glass. Silence. Then water is running out the taps. I know she will stand at the top of the stairs to the basement, holding her breath, listening. Nothing except darkness will meet her. I am pretending to be asleep.

The book highlights the tensions in Michele’s marriage as well as the tensions between her, her much more “forgiving” but highly strung younger sister, and Clara, who is fiercely independent but also fearful, lonely and increasingly paranoid.

Clever structure

Clara’s Daughter is told in uncluttered prose (though, admittedly, the first chapter feels a bit “flowery”, which is not indicative of the rest of the book), from various viewpoints and in brief chapters that jump backwards and forwards in time. The narrative is informed by an uncanny sense of silence and of space, which not only gives the story room to “breathe” but helps create a sense of increasing tension.

The clever structure shows how past resentments can fester if not dealt with, as well as fleshing out the frailty of sexual love, the harsh realities of family duty and the different sides of ourselves that we present at work and home.

I found it a rather taut drama about domestic and matriarchal power in which each character is stuck in a “role” from which they can’t truly escape. It made me think a lot about how we treat our aged parents and whether daughters are always destined to become their mothers. This story doesn’t exactly provide the answers, but for a book that is less than 140 pages, it certainly packs a lot in.

It’s occasionally chilling but has a distinct ring of truth about it. I came away from the book feeling slightly unnerved, as if I’d had a ringside seat at a family gathering I wasn’t supposed to attend. It’s not designed to be voyeuristic, but the characters are so realistically drawn, so flawed and full of foibles, I felt I’d got personally caught up in their funny little power plays…

* In the interests of full disclosure, I know Meike personally.

Annie Ernaux, Author, Book review, Books in translation, France, memoir, Non-fiction, Quartet Books, Setting

‘A Woman’s Story’ by Annie Ernaux

kimbofo

A-Womans-Story

Non-fiction – paperback; Quartet Books; 96 pages; 2014. Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story is a deeply affecting and brutally honest memoir about the author’s mother and the sometimes-strained relationship they shared.

It was first published in France, in 1988, where it became a bestseller. It has just been reissued by Quartet Books — which first published it in English more than 20 years ago — in a rather handsome edition, complete with French flaps.

Mother-daughter relationship

At just 96 pages in length, A Woman’s Story packs quite a lot in. Ernaux not only examines the relationship she had with her mother — often in painstaking, heartbreaking, too-close-for-comfort detail — she also charts her mother’s life from her poor upbringing in a small Normandy town to her marriage and success as a shopkeeper; from her bored (and somewhat meaningless) retirement to her death in a geriatric hospital in Paris where she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

What emerges is a fascinating portrait of two women tied together by their biological relationship but never, truly, close. While it’s not a rosy account — there’s too much bitterness and conflict between them for that — it does reveal Ernaux’s admiration, her love and her attempt to reconcile her mother’s senile dementia with the “strong, radiant mother she once was”.

In many ways, the book is as much about mothers and daughters as it is about growing old, of the burdens we can place on loved ones and an examination of the grieving process.

The author, however, describes it like this:

This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. (Neither photographs, nor my own memories, nor even the reminiscences of my family can bring me this truth.)

Conflicting views

This is a theme Ernaux returns to again and again: this itching to get to the truth, to portray her mother in a fair light, even though she knows that her memories are coloured by emotion. She has a hard time trying to put her mother’s brusque manners, her desire to be a confidante, yet always bitterly critical, her lack of education and her desperate social climbing into context.

About midway through she confesses that she sometimes thought she was a good mother, at other times a bad one. “To get away from these contrasting views, which come from my earliest childhood, I try to describe and explain her life as if I were writing about someone else’s mother and a daughter that wasn’t me,” she writes.

This objectivity feels authentic, because there are thoughts and incidents revealed here that feel too painful and honest. It’s not an uncomfortable read — indeed, I flew through it in an hour or so, the writing is so eloquent — but it is a deeply affecting and poignant one.

Author, Book review, Canada, Carol Shields, Fiction, Fourth Estate, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Unless’ by Carol Shields

kimbofo

Unless

Fiction – paperback; Fourth Estate; 320 pages; 2003.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, Unless is an unusual story about a 44-year-old woman coming to terms with a family tragedy.

Reta Winters normally happy existence as the mother of three daughters, “marriage” to a successful doctor and growing success as a novelist and translator is shattered when her eldest daughter, Norah, suddenly withdraws from the world. No one is quite sure why Norah, an intelligent 19-year-old, has dropped out of college nor why she has started sitting on a street corner in Toronto wearing a sign around her neck that reads “goodness”.

Reta, disturbed by this apparently unexplainable turn of events, tries to continue life as normal, socialising with her friends and keeping up a veil of normalcy for the benefit of her two younger daughters. As a much-wanted distraction, she buries herself in her writing. But even that illusion of escapism begins to fall apart when her very hands-off editor dies and a younger, more domineering editor takes over.

On the surface Shield’s story is deceptively simple. But the narrative is actually quite clever. There are three strands — Reta’s ongoing quest for normalcy despite the puzzling behaviour of Norah; her book writing in which we, the reader, are introduced to her characters and her creative processes; and a series of letters in which Reta rails against the society she feels is to blame for her daughter’s problems. These are all woven seamlessly together, so it’s hard to know where Reta’s real life intersects with her creative life.

While this is an interesting, easy-to-read novel with a satisfying conclusion, I couldn’t help but feel that a writer writing about writing was a slightly cheap trick, something Shields herself alludes to on more than one occasion.