Tag: Novellas in November

Author, Book review, Fiction, Giramondo Publishing, Japan, Jessica Au, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Cold Enough For Snow’ by Jessica Au

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Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 108 pages; 2022.

Quiet books seem to be having a moment in my reading life. These books focus on introspective storytelling, nuanced character development and everyday life, rather than dramatic events or high-stakes plots.

Books I have read recently that are “quiet” include David Park’s Spies in Canaan, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (yet to be reviewed), Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person and Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. All are highly recommended.

Into that same category comes Australian writer Jessica Au’s much-lauded novella Cold Enough for Snow. This quiet, contemplative story about a woman who takes her mother on holiday with her to Japan won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction last week.

It’s won a slew of other awards and nominations, too (check out the Australian publisher’s page for a full listing), and even its humble beginnings came about because the manuscript won the inaugural 2020 Novel Prize, a joint venture between three international independent publishers who selected it from more than 1,500 entries.

Hypnotic prose

I had put off reading it because I had heard so much about it, but from the first page, I was lulled by the understated, hypnotic prose and the way it jumped about from one quiet reflection to another, stream of consciousness style, without ever losing its flow or rhythm.

I was so effortlessly drawn into the lives of these two characters, all told from the perspective of the daughter, that I almost felt I was there on holiday with them, crisscrossing Japan by train, eating out in small cafes and restaurants, visiting art galleries, buying hand-selected gifts to take home, and doing my best to ignore the rainy autumn weather.

The narrative is largely told in chronological order but does include some minor flashbacks that reveal the daughter’s past (she studied literature at college and used to work in a Chinese restaurant) and her relationship with her boyfriend, Laurie, with whom she’s considering having children. There’s a brief mention of a sister.

Seeking to connect

The story explores connections — whether between people, such as mother and daughter, and the deeply felt emotional connections we might experience with art and nature. Travel, of course, is the perfect prism to explore this idea, because when we travel, we temporarily lose our familiar social connections and routines, but often develop new connections — cultural, historical, environmental and personal — which make the experience so rewarding and memorable.

In Cold Enough for Snow, the daughter is desperate to reconnect with her mother in a way she can’t quite articulate. They both live in different cities, in an unnamed country (which is presumably Australia because that is where the writer is based), and speak different languages, so the trip to Japan is a chance to spend rare time together, renew their bond and enjoy each other’s company.

I wanted more of those moments, to feel fluency running through me, to know someone and to have them know me. I thought too of how my mother’s first language was Cantonese, and how mine was English, and how we only ever spoke together in one, and not the other.

But the daughter, who narrates the story, is angst-ridden, frustrated and often talks down to her mother in a patronising tone of voice.

There’s a feeling that they are dancing around something. Something vague and nebulous that is the very crux, or essence, of the story. (When you figure out what it is, it turns the whole narrative on its head.)

Quiet presence

Meanwhile, her mother’s presence is so unobtrusive as to be ghostlike. A reluctant traveller — “I had pushed, and eventually she had agreed, not in so many words, but by protesting slightly less, or hesitating over the phone when I asked her” — she is introverted and passive, rarely, if ever, expresses an opinion, and doesn’t much care for anything they do or see.

She’s easygoing, which makes her the ideal travel partner in my books, but the daughter wants more — she doesn’t want to have to carry the mental load of every decision about where to eat, what to see and do each day.

Visits to art galleries, temples and churches form the heart of their itinerary, but the mother remains frustratingly unresponsive to what she sees. In one instance, she doesn’t even want to go inside, choosing to wait for her daughter outdoors instead. And then she forgets to bring her walking boots, which means she must forgo a planned hike into the mountains, which was probably an unsuitable exercise for her anyway. The daughter, in a fit of pique, goes off alone.

This story leaves so many questions unanswered that it lingers in the mind for a long time afterwards. Cold Enough for Snow is the kind of book where not much happens, but everything does — if you read between the lines.

There are plenty of other reviews online, both good and bad, if you search for them.

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.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Classic, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘Two Lives’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 384 pages; 2016.

Two very different women, with different attitudes, personalities and lived experiences, star in William Trevor’s novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, which are brought together in one volume under the title Two Lives, originally published in 1991.

It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to suggest the two female protagonists in this volume share commonalities, or are linked in any way, but reading each story, one after the other, it’s hard not to draw comparisons.

Both Mary Louise Dallon, who stars in Reading Turgenev, and Emily Delahunty (Mrs Delahunty), from My House in Umbria, are childfree and financially secure, but they are lonely and yearn for romance.

And perhaps because they don’t fit into the templated lives that society deems “normal”, both experience a kind of insanity. Mary Louise, moves into an attic to escape her much older alcoholic husband and his controlling sisters, and is later committed to an asylum, while Mrs Delahunty’s behaviour, fuelled by drink, becomes increasingly more unhinged as her past comes back to haunt her.

Innocence versus experience

Of course, they are also vastly different. Mary Louise is sexually inexperienced, having entered a marriage that has never been consummated, while Mrs Delahunty was sexually abused as a child and once supported herself through prostitution.

Mary Louise is quiet and introverted; Mrs Delahunty loud and convivial. Mary Louise longs to escape the family she married into; Miss Delahunty dreams of finding a family she can call her own.

The tone, style and setting of both novellas are also different. Reading Turgenev employs a third-person narrator to tell Mary Louise’s sad and melancholy story. It also features a dual timeline that intertwines the story of an unhappy marriage with Mary Louise’s confinement in a psychiatric institution for more than 30 years

By contrast, My House in Umbria is narrated in the first person using a jolly, upbeat and deeply intimate voice.

The former is set in Ireland in the mid-20th century, the latter in Italy in 1987.

So, what are the stories about? Let me briefly explain each in turn.

Reading Turgenev

Reading Turgenev is about a farm girl who secures her future by marrying Elmer Quarry, a man much older than her — “the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around” — who runs a drapery store in town with his two (meddling and not very nice) spinster sisters, Matilda and Rose.

And why should they put themselves out by the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop.

The marriage does not get off to a good start, because Elmer, who is normally a teetotaller, gets drunk on their honeymoon and passes out. The pair never consummate their relationship, even when they return home, and consequently never have children, to the puzzlement of many, including family (his and hers), village residents and busybodies.

But the issue is never discussed between the pair. Instead, Elmer deals with it by drinking in secret, while Mary Louise begins bicycling out to visit her impoverished aunt and her invalid cousin, Robert, with whom she has been in love since she was a young girl.

It is Robert who reads the works of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev to her, hence the novella’s title, but their relationship is a clandestine one, which is what makes it all so heart-rending when he dies unexpectedly.

In her bereavement, Mary Louise becomes increasingly more introverted and isolated, with dire consequences for her own sanity. When she is seen buying rat poison, the sisters believe their lives are being put at risk… but is that really the case?

Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

My House in Umbria

My House in Umbria is about a romantic novelist who survives a terrorist attack on a train in Italy and invites fellow survivors from her carriage to spend their convalescence at her villa free of charge.

This brings together a diverse group of individuals, including a British general, a German man whose fiancee was killed in the bombing, and Aimee, a young American girl who has been orphaned and has now retreated into silence.

Mrs Delahunty delights in the company of this new “family”, especially as their imagined lives and backstories will provide fodder for her next novel, but everything is thrown into disarray when Aimee’s uncle, a rather aloof man called Thomas Riversmith, arrives to take his niece back home.

Our narrator, who has a troubled past — her sideshow parents sold her to a foster family and her foster father later “satisfied his base desires” with her — becomes infatuated by Mr Riversmith and sets her amorous sights on him. When she overhears him saying not very nice things about her, she’s even more determined to have her way with him.

He was remarking, when I lifted the receiver, that he had never before encountered a romantic novelist. Then, distressing me considerably, he referred to as ‘trash’ what last night he had called most interesting. He referred to the grappa we’d enjoyed together as an unpleasant drink. The word ‘grotesque’ was used in a sentence I couldn’t catch.

The book ends with all the patients returning to their respective homes and Mrs Delahunty renting out her spare rooms once again to tourists, but something has irrevocably changed in her: “Perhaps I’ll become old, perhaps not,” she muses. “Perhaps something else will happen in my life, but I doubt it.”

My House in Umbria was adapted for American television in 2003, starring Maggie Smith.

Trevor’s trademark best

Together these two novellas pack a powerful punch and demonstrate Trevor at his trademark best: showing us the remarkable interior lives of two ordinary but highly resilient women getting by as best they can. The first showcases his melancholy life-in-an-Irish-village style, the second his black comedic style.

If you have not read him before and want to get a taster for his different types of writing, this would be a good one to start with.

Both are highly engaging reads, but if I had to choose between the two, I preferred My House in Umbria, only because the voice was more comedic and the story less gloomy. I found Mrs Delahunty larger than life and her antics ludicrously entertaining, somewhat reminiscent of Mrs Eckdorf in his 1970 novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, and also Miss Gomez in Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971).

Finally, there’s an eloquent review of both published in the New York Times, which describes Two Lives so much better than I ever could.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. 
Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy also reviewed ‘Two Lives’.

♥ Next month Sadly, December will mark the end of ‘A Year with William Trevor’. Cathy plans to read ‘Last Stories’ (which I have previously reviewed here) and in a slight change to our schedule, I plan on reading the novella ‘Bodily Secrets’, which was published as part of Penguin’s Great Love series.

I also 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, Bloomsbury, Book review, Emma Glass, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Wales

‘Peach’ by Emma Glass

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Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 102 pages; 2019.

I’m not sure what to make of Peach, the debut by Welsh writer Emma Glass, which portrays the aftermath of a teenage girl’s unreported sexual assault.

Told in the first person in a stream-of-consciousness style, it uses disjointed language and repeated words and phrases to mirror the girl’s thought patterns.

It is not an easy read. That’s because of the gruesome subject matter and the style Glass employs to tell the story. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish what is real and what is not and whether Peach (that’s the name of our narrator) is hallucinating or simply imagining events because she’s been so traumatised.

I am not a proponent of censorship, but I do think Peach should come with a trigger warning. It deals with sensitive issues that some readers may find upsetting. This review may do likewise, so please bear that in mind if you decide to continue.

Returning home

When the book opens we are thrust right into the aftermath of the girl’s assault as she returns home and sneaks into the house so her parents won’t question what has happened to her:

I  slip inside. I don’t open the door wide. It still squeaks. They will hear. They will corner me in the hall. They will ask questions. He won’t ask about the blood. She won’t ask about the rips in my clothes. She will say the rose in my cheeks looks pretty. He will kiss my head and say dinner is at seven. I swallow a mouthful of sick and slip silently up the stairs still chewing my mitten.

I’ll refrain from going into details, but she sews herself up down there and then has dinner with her parents as if nothing has happened.

Her parents, by the way, are odd and a little creepy. They have a baby (who is called Baby) and speak openly about sex. Her dad goes as far as to say he’s proud Peach sleeps with her boyfriend (who is called Green):

It is good to get experience, and well, if you get blessed with a baby, that’s even better.

That fear of pregnancy hangs over Peach like a dark shadow. Her belly is swollen and tight, and she thinks it is getting bigger. She never tells Green that she’s been raped, so when they go to a pharmacy to buy a pregnancy test, he doesn’t realise that anyone else could have fathered a child with her.

Grim and gruesome

Yes, it’s all rather grim. And gruesome. But it is also suspenseful and intriguing.

When a series of “love letters” turn up, supposedly from her perpetrator (whom she dubs “sausage man”), it suggests he is obsessed and dangerous.

Other horrible things happen — the family cat goes missing, for instance, and Green is beaten up so badly he must go to hospital — for which Sausage Man seems to be to blame. But how much of this is in Peach’s head and how much of it actually happens is difficult to determine.

Toward the end, Peach goes on a wild rampage and butchers her assailant, offering up chunks of meat to her parents who delight in cooking it on the barbecue unaware that it is human flesh. But again, is this real? Or is Peach projecting?

I’m not sure what the point of the story is other than to suggest that when we don’t properly deal with trauma it impacts our mental and emotional well-being, leading to severe psychological distress.

But Peach left me with more questions than answers. Why were her parents so blind to her condition? Why didn’t Green suspect something was wrong? And why was her stomach so swollen?

The author, who is a children’s nurse, cites James Joyce and Gertrude Stein (among others) as influences. I thought the work was also reminiscent of Eimear McBride’s ‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’, with a dash of Laura Jean McKay’s ‘The Animals in that Country’ thrown in for good measure.

But there’s no doubt that Peach is wholly original — and profoundly disturbing. It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted.

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, 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.

Book lists

Captivating tales from around the globe: 12 novellas in translation to add to your TBR

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I love novellas. I love translated fiction. Bring them both together in a single volume and, in my eyes, you have a winning combination.

Given that Novellas in November, an annual reading event (hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck), is just around the corner, I thought it might be helpful to create a handpicked list of translated novellas reviewed on this site.

The list has been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname. To see a full review, simply click the book title.

‘Lie With Me’ by Philippe Besson | France | 2019

Bittersweet tale about first love between two teenage boys in rural France in the 1980s.

‘Troubling Love’ by Elena Ferrante | Italy | 1999

A middle-aged comic strip artist goes on a personal quest to discover the circumstances of her mother’s death.

‘The Dry Heart’ by Natalia Ginzburg | Italy | 1947

After just four years of marriage a wife shoots dead her husband, but why?

‘Magma’ by Thora Hjörleifsdóttir | Iceland | 2021

A university student falls in love with a manipulative narcissist who is much older than her.

‘The Last Summer’ by Ricarda Huch | German | 1910

When the governor of St Petersburg retreats to his summer residence, his wife hires a bodyguard to protect them with devastating consequences.

‘The Woman in the Blue Cloak’ by Deon Meyer | Afrikaans | 2018

A South African detective investigates the murder of a foreign woman who had been on the hunt for a rare painting from the Dutch Golden Age.

‘Sundays in August’ by Patrick Modiano | France | 1986

In this noirish crime story, a young woman flees her husband, taking her lover and a hugely valuable diamond with her.

‘The House on the Hill’ by Cesare Pavese | Italy | 1948

A school teacher befriends a group of anti-fascists during the Second World War but can’t quite commit to their cause.

‘Untold Night and Day’ by Bae Suah | South Korea | 2020

An audio theatre employee traverses the city in a single dizzying 24-hour period and meets various intriguing characters.

‘And the Wind Sees All’ by Gudmundur Andri Thorsson | Iceland | 2018

The lives of various residents in a small Icelandic fishing village are told in a series of interconnected stories.

‘Territory of Light’ by Yuko Tsushima | Japan | 1979

After her husband walks out on her, a mother struggles to raise her two-year-old daughter alone.

‘Dry Milk’ by Huo Yan | China | 2019

A disgruntled Chinese immigrant living in Auckland embarks on a dodgy export business selling powdered milk abroad.

For more novella recommendations, please see my list of 17 intriguing novellas you can read in a day. Or just click my novella tag.

Book chat

What is a novella?

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In his role as the Laureate for Irish Fiction, Colm Tóibín writes a monthly blog on the Arts Council of Ireland website, which always makes fascinating reading.

This month he has written about novellas (which makes me wonder does he know about Novellas in November hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck?) and made some very bold statements about the genre.

In response to the question “what is a novella”, he writes:

A novella is something no one wants. Publishers live in dread of them because no one much will buy them. There is no prize for the best novella of the year; there never will be. If you are engaged in writing a novella, it is with a lonely feeling that no one is waiting for you to finish it. No one is ever going to say: I am so looking forward to your next novella.

He later goes on to argue that, caught between a short story and a novel, the novella generally has just “one plot-line, one protagonist, and its meaning can unfold or be revealed without any recourse to transcendence”. On this basis, he suggests that “Claire Keegan’s ‘Foster’ is a novella, but her ‘Small Things Like These’ is a novel”.  That’s because:

Furlong’s own life story is dramatized as much as the actual events that occur in the novel’s time-span. If we didn’t have the story of his upbringing, then the book would be a novella.

This made me think about all the many dozens of novellas I’ve read over the years that have complex storylines, with back stories and present stories all combining to form a single narrative. Have I misunderstood what a novella is?

I generally decide if a book is a novella by the number of pages it possesses, because if I haven’t read it, how do I know if the story is complex enough to meet the definition? My rule of thumb is this: if the book has less than 150 or so pages, it’s a novella (sometimes I might push it to 200 pages if the font size is large); more than 150 pages and it’s a novel.

According to this Wikipedia article, a novella is determined by word count — between 17,500 and 40,000 words — but that’s not something you can easily work out by picking up a book. That same article also confirms Tóibín’s idea that the narrative in a novella is generally less complex than one in a novel.

A novella generally features fewer conflicts than a novel, yet more complicated ones than a short story. The conflicts also have more time to develop than in short stories.

Later in his blog post, Tóibín suggests that some of the very best writing is to be found in the novella form (to which I agree) but then argues that because so few novellas get published, they often get buried away in short story collections and are never discovered by readers.

“But maybe novella-writers should rise up,” he writes.

Or maybe the name itself – novella – should change, just as Windscale, which had a bad reputation, became Sellafield, or Facebook became Meta. Or maybe these categories – short story, novella, novel – really make no sense and have no clear borders.

You can read the blog post in full here.

What do you think? What does the term novella mean to you? And does a definition really matter?

Reading Projects

It’s time to dust off your novellas!

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I’m a big fan^^ of novellas — those works of fiction, generally less than 200 pages, that can be read in a matter of hours but linger in the memory for much longer — so I don’t normally need an excuse to read them. But this month is Novellas in November (#NovNov22) hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck so I’m devoting the month to reading as many as I can from my existing TBR.

And because there’s a couple of other reading months happening, I’ve made sure there’s some in the pile by Australian authors for Brona’s #ReadingAusMonth and a few translated from the German language for Lizzie’s #GermanLitMonth.

Here’s what’s in my pile:

AUSTRALIAN BOOKS

GERMAN BOOKS

  • ‘The Last Summer’ by Ricarda Huch (translated by Jamie Bulloch)
  • ‘You Would have Missed Me’ by Birgit Vanderbeke (translated by Jamie Bulloch)
  • ‘Two Women and a Poisoning’ by Alfred Doblin (translated by Imogen Taylor)

OTHER BOOKS

  • ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ by John Buchan
  • ‘Catholics’ by Brian Moore
  • ‘And the Wind Sees All’ by Gudmundur Andri Thorsson
  • ‘The Man I Became’ by Peter Verhelist
  • ‘Confessions of a Mask’ by Yukio Mishima
  • ‘The Faces’ by Tove Ditlevsen
  • ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’ by Sigrid Nunez
  • ‘The Lost Daughter’ by Elena Ferrante
  • ‘From the Land of the Moon’ by Milena Agus

I’m really looking forward to reading as many of these as I can in November, but where to start?

Have you read any of these books? Recommendations for what to read first are very welcome!

 

^^ Some of the best books I have ever read have been novellas. Some examples include ‘Academy Street’ by Mary Costello, ‘The Lover’ by Marguerite Duras and ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ by Jay McInerney. For more truly memorable novellas, please check my list of 17 intriguing novellas you can read in a day (or an afternoon).

Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Fiona Scarlett, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Boys Don’t Cry’ by Fiona Scarlett

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Faber & Faber; 178 pages; 2021.

It sounded like Da was crying. I’ve never seen Da cry. He tells us that crying is a sign of weakness. That boys don’t cry. That boys should never cry. So we don’t. Ever. Unless we’re in private, when nobody sees.

If you took a big cooking pot and threw in Irish authors Roddy Doyle and Kit de Waal, then added the scriptwriters for the Irish gangster TV series Love/Hate and gave it a good stir, the end result might be Fiona Scarlett’s Boys Don’t Cry.

This novella about sibling love, divided loyalties, illness, grief and toxic masculinity is a heartrending — and heartwarming — read.

A tale of two brothers

Set in working-class Dublin, the story unfolds through the eyes of two brothers, who tell their version of events in alternate chapters.

Joe is 17 and a gifted artist. He’s been lucky enough to secure a place in a prestigious private school, but he is constantly aware that he is from a different social class and doesn’t quite fit in. He’s often bullied and expected to behave in a stereotypical way, purely because of his background.

Finn is 12 and a happy-go-lucky boy who loves playing sport and having fun with friends. He looks up to his big brother and adores his Ma and Da. But when he develops unexplained bruising on his arms and legs and begins suffering from bad nose bleeds, a question mark is raised over his health. Is he being physically abused at home, or is something else going on?

What makes the story so compelling is the way in which it is told, for each brother’s version of events is told in a different time period — Joe’s is AFTER Finn’s — but they are interleaved so that one loosely informs the other to make a more powerful read.

Working-class family

When I began reading this book, I literally had no idea what it was about. I have no memory of buying it and don’t know why I did so, other than it must have received a good review somewhere or I thought the subject matter appealed at the time. (According to Amazon, I purchased it on 1 May 2021.)

While it soon becomes clear that the family in Boys Don’t Cry is not your usual working-class family — Da runs a drug operation for the local kingpin, Dessie Murphy, but is now locked up in Mountjoy prison for shooting a policeman, who nearly died — it takes a while to figure out why everyone is wracked with grief and why Joe hates his father so much.

In fact, Joe, a complex character, is the heart of this story. He’s the one who holds the narrative together and makes it such a compelling read because you feel for him — and fear for him.

He’s clearly emotionally troubled — it takes some time to get to the root of why this might be the case — and he’s filled with hate for Dessie Murphy and wants nothing to do with him. But when his friend Sabine incurs a debt she can’t pay off, the temptation to do a one-off job for the gangster becomes hard to resist.

As a reader, you know that Dessie is grooming Joe to join the gang, but Joe is naive, oblivious to the dangers and realities of the criminal underworld: it’s never a case of just doing one job and walking away, once you’re in the “family” you can never leave…

A tear-jerker

Boys Don’t Cry is a remarkable read in so many ways. It’s a brilliant evocation of a family plunged in grief, of a teenager struggling to determine his own code of ethics and of a young boy grappling with mortality. It’s about heavy subjects but there are flashes of humour throughout to lighten the load.

The author is a primary school teacher and it’s clear she knows what makes children and teens tick; she really conveys their moods and feelings and mindset in an authentic way.

A word of warning though. I wouldn’t recommend reading this one in public — and I’d suggest having tissues on hand, because it’s a bit of a tear-jerker, ironic given the title, which is all about repressing emotions and keeping everything in check.

I read this book for Novellas in November (#NovNov), which is hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck 

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Deon Meyer, Fiction, Hodder, Publisher, Setting, South Africa, translated fiction

‘The Woman in the Blue Cloak’ by Deon Meyer (translated by K.L. Seegers)

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Fiction – paperback; Hodder & Stoughton; 141 pages; 2018. Translated from Afrikaans by K.L. Seegers.

Deon Meyer’s The Woman in the Blue Cloak captured my attention when I saw it on the shelves of my local library because it was:

✔️ a novella;

✔️ a crime story;

✔️ the crime involved art from the Dutch Golden Age;

✔️ it had an evocative setting (South Africa); and

✔️ it was translated fiction.

It also helped I had read Meyer’s work before (Blood Safari in 2015, which was excellent), so I knew I could trust him to write a well crafted, intelligent crime story with plenty of social commentary.

Murder of a tourist

Despite the fact it starts with a tired old trope — the murder of a beautiful woman (sigh) — The Woman in the Blue Cloak is not a conventional murder story.

For a start, the victim, Alicia Lewis, is a foreigner on a flying visit to South Africa. She’s an American based in London who works for an organisation that recovers lost or stolen works of art.

When her body is found naked and washed in bleach, draped on a wall beside a road in Cape Town, the police investigation begins by trying to identify her, before looking into a motive for the crime and locating the perpetrator.

The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius

I’m not going to give away plot spoilers, but I think it’s safe to say Ms Lewis had been in South Africa to track down a rare painting by the Dutch Golden Age artist Carel Fabritius. (Fabritius is probably most famous for his painting The Goldfinch, from 1654, and the one that features in Donna Tartt’s novel of the same name.)

The police investigation traces the root of the crime all the way back to the 17th century, before concluding with a relatively neat ending that, to be perfectly frank, didn’t quite convince me — although it didn’t take away from the enjoyment of this well-told story.

Entertaining police procedural

The Woman in the Blue Cloak (the title refers to the name of the Fabritius painting that Ms Lewis is trying to locate) is an intriguing police procedural set in a culturally diverse part of the world grappling with all kinds of racial and political tensions, long after Apartheid has fallen by the wayside.

It’s the sixth book in Meyer’s Detective Benny Griessel series but it works as a standalone. I haven’t read the previous books in the series and it certainly didn’t impact my enjoyment or understanding of this story.

I particularly liked the camaraderie — and the lively banter — between Griessel and his colleague Vaugh Cupido, and the ways in which they worked together to achieve a result.

Griessel spends the entirety of the investigation being distracted by a personal dilemma — he’s trying to secure a bank loan so that he can buy an engagement ring. His impecunious situation is nicely contrasted with the value of the Fabritius painting, believed to be worth a hundred million dollars.

This is an enjoyable novella, tightly written, fast-paced and well plotted. What more could you want from a crime story?

I read this book for Novellas in November (#NovNov), which is hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck 

Book review

November reading plans

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My pile of novellas

I don’t usually plan my reading that too far ahead, but next month there are various reading events hosted by some of my favourite bloggers all happening at once, and I don’t want to miss out.

I’ve dug out all my novellas so that I can participate in Novellas in November (#NovNov) hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck, and to ensure I can kill two birds (or is it three?) with one stone, I have ensured there’s some in the pile by Australian authors for Brona’s #ReadingAusMonth and a few translated from the German language for Lizzie’s #GermanLitMonth.

I’m not going to read everything in the pile photographed above, but it’s nice to have plenty to choose from depending on mood and time. Here’s what’s in the pile:

AUSTRALIAN BOOKS

  • ‘In the Winter Dark’ by Tim Winton
  • ‘The White Woman’ by Liam Davidson
  • ‘The Long Green Shore’ by John Hepworth
  • ‘The Orchard Thieves’ by Elizabeth Jolley
  • ‘Girl with a Monkey’ by Thea Astley

GERMAN BOOKS

  • ‘You Would have Missed Me’ by Birgit Vanderbeke (translated by Jamie Bulloch)
  • ‘Two Women and a Poisoning’ by Alfred Doblin (translated by Imogen Taylor)
  • ‘The Last Summer’ by Ricarda Huch (translated by Jamie Bulloch)
  • ‘To Die in Spring’ by Ralf Rothmann (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

OTHER BOOKS

  • ‘And the Wind Sees All’ by Gudmundur Andri Thorsson (translated from the Icelandic by Borg Arnadottir and Andrew Cauthery)
  • ‘The Man I Became’ by Peter Verhelist (translated from the Dutch by David Colmer)
  • ‘Untold Day and Night’ by Bae Suah (translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith)
  • ‘The Faces’ by Tove Ditlevsen (translated from the Danish by Tina Nunnally)
  • ‘Assembly’ by Natasha Brown
  • ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’ by Sigrid Nunez
  • ‘One Fine Day’ by Mollie Panter-Downes
  • ‘Touch the Water, Touch the Wind’ by Amoz Oz (translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange)

I’m really looking forward to reading as many of these as I can in November, but where to start?

Have you read any of these books? Recommendations for what to read first are very welcome!