Looking Back and Forth

So we have rolled around to another year. There seems to be some consensus on good riddance to 2025. Routine life has plodded on with the highlight being my trip to Japan, but it now seems so long ago that I am barely sure it happened. Monkey is visiting in July this year so I can count down to the next time I see her. We chat on WhatsApp but it's not the same. I have restarted (for the third time) learning Japanese, but deliberately started before the new year so that it was definitely not a resolution. I need to go back to exercising but am going to consider my brain health first. And then financial health, which will involve not taking on anything else that will cost money; paying down the mortgage is going to be a priority.

So, books? I don't feel like I have read very much, and certainly far too many that were a bit meh. Having started well I have often not really liked the book club books, but I love the talking so have persevered with it and will continue to do so. Here is this year's list:

• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
• The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama
• Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
• The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
• The Gentleman From Peru by André Aciman
• Enter Ghost by Isabella Hamad
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
• Bird Life by Anna Smaile
• When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson
• There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
• The Beekeeper of Sunjar by Dunya Mikhail
• The Echoes by Evie Wyld
• The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
• Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
• Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
• The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
• Your Neighbour's Table by Gu Byeyong-Mo
• Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
• When Will There be Good News by Kate Atkinson
• The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
• Spoiled Creatures by Amy Twigg
• The World According to Garp by John Irving
• Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman
• Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver
• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
• The Anechoic Chamber by Will Wiles
• Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo
• The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale
• The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
• The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley
• Recursion by Blake Crouch (not worth a review, though I did read it all)

37 reviewed last year, though several abandoned part way and two to come from before Christmas, both wonderful (see one below). Highlight of the year has to the Emperor of Gladness, but also Orbital and Safekeep (below). More than I remembered that I did enjoy, maybe I was just being negative, it wasn't bad reading just neglectful reviewing.

'The Safekeep' by Yael Van Der Wouden was shortlisted for the Booker and won the Women's Fiction Prize in 2025, so was definitely on my radar. It starts a bit slow, with Isabel who lives a very small life in her childhood home, after her mother's death. Lots of snippets to come because it was so beautiful; coming back from dinner with her brother Hendrik :

"Home, when she arrived, welcomes her with relief. There you are, said the dim light in the kitchen, left on for comfort. I've waited up for you, said the rattle of the key in the door." (p.18)

After another family dinner her other brother Louis announces he is sending his current girlfriend Eva to stay with Isabel while he has to be away working. She resents the intrusion in her life but is so meek and submissive she just accepts it. The days, then weeks go past, the two young women tiptoeing around each other, Isabel resentful, Eva desperate to ingratiate herself. Isabel is obsessed with her possessions and the fear of someone stealing them, she goes around the house making an inventory, rechecking the spoons and ornaments. But Eva pushes back against her reserve until a tension exists between them. It starts really slow and builds:

"Up in her room Isabel sat at her dresser. There was a cloud of bugs by the open window, catching there setting sun, dancing up, down. In the mirror Isabel tried to see what Eva had seen. She pulled the strand from behind her ear, arranged it over her eye again. Pushed it back, hand slow, smoothing it back. She touched her cheek, the corner of her wide mouth.. Her fingers to her lips: she pushed two inside, over her tongue, the ridge of her teeth, and then a door slammed shut downstairs and Isabel got up and dried her fingers off on her skirt and swallowed three times. She could still taste her own skin. She rearranged herself, looked from the window to the wall to the bed." (p.58)

The next day Louis phones:

"Isabel put her forehead to the papered wall, looked in through the gap of the door hinge. Eva sat on the arm of the couch, phone to her ear. She had her hair up. Her dye job had missed the patch at the nape of her neck, and there was soft brown hair there, a few curls. The top buckle of her spine jutted pout above the collar of her blouse. Of her face, Isabel could only see the curve of her cheek, the shape of her smile." (p.63)

On the surface there is a formal awkward atmosphere between them, and then a horrible interlude where a local man who is basically harassing Isabel takes her on a date, because she is incapable of refusing him (and I became convinced he was going to rape her). Hendrik and his boyfriend Sebastian come and visit for a few days, and it breaks the tension between them, diverting their attention, but then Eva kisses her, and all hell lets loose.

"Isabel, too full to be teased, came to stand behind her. Wrapped her arms around her, pressed her face to Eva's neck and stayed there. Eva's laughter went quiet. She let herself be held a moment. She stroked Isabel's arms. She said, quiet, 'Who are you?' she said, 'Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?'" (p.149)

Then, 

"'That's nice,' Eva swayed into her. Isabel turned her face this way, that. Eva let her. Isabel kept her with a hand to the small of her back. She put the wet towel to Eva's throat.

'Yeah,' Eva sighed, and shivered. Isabel held her there. A hand over coth over throat - held her there like that. Held her by the throat." (p.152)

and my mind leapt ahead anticipating huge crushing heartbreak and a terrible, terrible consequence. The intense passion of their relationship seemed to only allow for tragedy. But the story is so much more subtle than that. There is back story that emerges gradually, as we learn who Eva really is and how she came to be in Isabel's house. 

The first part of the story is tight with anticipation and the second half swamped with passion. Both women, so lost and alone, you want them to find and keep each other. 

I'll just finish with this last one, a quote from Eva's diary February 8 1961:

"She was staring at me. She stared in a way that I knew she would want to talk to me. I did not want that. She came to me just as I wanted to bike away and held my arm and said that I was Esther's girl. 'Aren't you? Aren't you Esther's girl? You are, I know it.' I couldn't say anything. It was like someone had put a stone in my mouth and now I could not speak. Who says my mother's name other than Malcha? No one says her name to me these days. She insisted on speaking to me. She wanted me to come have tea at a café at the corner. I thought, Oh, she has someone waiting there who will get me and send me to the Germans. That's what I thought! And then I thought: that can't happen anymore. Isn't that strange, how that works? You can think something that used to be true but isn't true anymore but still believe it in your bones." (p.196)

What a lovely book, intense and overwhelming. just what I needed to end the year.

Stay safe. Be kind.

Books

So 'The Coin' by Yasmin Zaher is due back at the library, and I am really struggling to get anything done so this is a whizz through a few books from July. This was some weird shit. Another Palestinian character (after Enter Ghost a couple of months ago), but living in New York and obsessed with cleanliness and designer labels. Note to self : try writing a note to yourself about when and why you request a book from the library; I have no idea why I ordered this. I reiterate, it was weird shit. Loved the flip book on the edges of the pages though, of a coin spinning: I tried to make a film of it but couldn't get the pages to run smoothly. 

'Your Neighbour's Table' by Gu Byeong-mo was the book club book for July. Interesting discussion was had as usual but I did not like this book. Originally in Korean, it is a strange tale of 'communal living', arranged by the government in subsidised accommodation to 'encourage' young couples to have more children. It didn't really tackle the issue of why people are not having children, nor what countries might do about low birth rates; maybe treat women with more respect springs to mind. A bunch of useless husbands and stressed wives share a block of flats and struggle to get to know each other, let alone like each other. 

'Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil' by Oliver Darkshire (who has no website) was bought for my granddaughter Aisla. A brilliant disturbing plot with magic and goblins (who appear to be a fungal based lifeform) and layabout husbands (I see a theme developing) and a pot of basil. Isabella is a heroine for our times indeed. Aspects of the humour are very Terry Pratchett but in no way a steal of his style. Particularly liked the footnotes. Totally loved it ... and hope she does too.

'Case Histories' by Kate Atkinson is my second foray into Jackson Brodie. I was rather snooty about him last time, back to 2009 but I loved this one. Engaging characters, convoluted plot that all pulled together believably. 

Little quote here:

"Julia embarked own a second cup of tea. It was too hot for tea; Jackson longed for an ice-cold beer. Julia's white teacup bore the imprint of her mouth in lipstick and Jackson experienced a sudden memory of his sister. she had worn a less strident colour, a pastel pink, and on every cup and glass she ever drank from she left behind the ghostly transfer of her lips. The thought of Niamh made his heart feel heavy in his chest, literally, not metaphorically." (p.157)

But the moment that caught my eye was this one, after a particularly grisly murder:

"If she could have one wish - if her fairy godmother (noticeably absent from her life so far) were to suddenly appear in the cold living room of the cottage and offer to grant her whatever she wanted - Michelle knew exactly what she would ask for. She would ask to go back to the beginning of her life and start all over again." (p.68)

Because this is the exact plot of 'Life After Life' that she published in 2013.

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Third day - Irena Rey

I read 'The Extinction of Irena Rey' by Jennifer Croft a couple of months ago for my book group (yes, this is how far behind the reviews are). I knew I was going to love it after the first page, and even more so when I discovered she had translated for Olga Tokarczuk. I was perturbed to discover that most people in the book group did not like it very much (more book group issues to come).

So the book is about a group of translators who are going to stay with their author, Irena Rey, to work on her next book. This is her routine, to get them all together so she can supervise ... and control. In the first part of the book they are all just referred to by their language, as the story progresses they learn each other's real names. While the book appears here in English the story is being written by the Spanish translator (presumably in Spanish), and then of course translated by the English translator, a woman who is of course a character in the story. Others in the group did not like the 'translator footnotes', but I enjoyed the light it shone on the relationship between the two women. It's all about the layers. There is lots of talk about translation, and about literature. It's a very intellectual book, lots of obscure references, and vocabulary that I was not familiar with. It starts out kind of normal but then Irena disappears, and her husband, who usually takes care of the domestic stuff, is absent. The translators don't know what to do with themselves. They flail around waiting for her to return, but she doesn't. It wasn't until weeks after the meeting (shows it was a good book because I was still thinking about it) that it occurred to me that it was a grown up version of Lord of the Flies. They are dumped in a strange, scary environment (the house is on the edge of a strange and forbidding forest) without the usual support, they forage for food in the forest, leaders emerge, they create their own rituals, they explore their environment, rivalries develop ... and someone dies falling off a cliff. The whole book had a surreal, dreamlike quality, nothing they thought they knew about Irena or each other turns out to be true.

None of the quotes I noted down seem to make any sense now so I'm just going to give you this long bit because I feel it captures the atmosphere of the book. Book club people didn't like the 'descriptive' bits either so I was left wondering what they wanted from their reading:

"Dawn was impending; already the sky was blueish grey. I took Tropinka Street out of the village, east into the national park, walking carefully so as not to crush any of the infinitesimal frogs that burst from the pine needles half a dozen at a time; like translators, perhaps, they were invisible other than in motion. I shuddered to think what bad luck it would be ifI were to crush an infinitesimal being underfoot.

Because I didn't feel confident in my ability to detect the kugans and other unmarked graves around the forest, I determined to limit my purview to the known dead. Still, I wanted to feel at least a little brave, so I set out for a place I'd never been but that I'd read about, a so-called place of national memory about three kilometres away.

As I walked, I saw that some of the trees wore more strange symbols, white lines with red between them; their paint was fading, chipped. A massive sign at a crossroads listed all the things you weren't allowed to do inside the national park part of the forest: hunt mushrooms, smoke cigarettes, stray from the official path. Yet on either side of the official path the forest floor was soft with moss, opulent, beckoning, extending an almost opiate effect.

To my left, I saw smoke rising, and I strayed a little from the path. Beams of light that were so bright they seemed opaque, almost solid, embraceable, had touched down upon a mossy stump. the rest o0f the tree lay in the grass, the exposed wood rough as though after an explosion - just as Petra had seen in her dream.

I squatted beside it, searching for the fire. But there was no fire, and the smoke must have been steam, abundant and unfurling, the metamorphosing dew the moss had gathered overnight. I watched it a while: It was beautiful, but it was also disturbing. I decided to take a picture, not to keep as a souvenir, but to study later, after I was fully awake.

When I pressed the shutter circle on the screen of my iPhone, the artificial click dispelled any lingering ease. I rose from the ground and felt wild as a hunted animal. Leshy or the archer could be anywhere, I realised - in the moss, in the mushrooms, in the trees. I thought I heard steps, or something that sounded like steps. It was a deer, I told myself. Just red deer grazing.

I remembered the path, and then I saw it, and without thinking of the tiny frogs I leaped across the moss field and retook it. I began walking quickly without allowing myself to turn around. I knew that this was happening because I lost my lucky acorn, and because I had failed to understand Irena, and most of all because none of us had acted - had ever acted - -in time. The steps got louder, and I took off at a run." (p.149-150)

Stay safe. Be kind. May see you later with more books.

I who have never known men

I am going to get back on track with everything, reading, reviewing, watering the garden, learning Japanese ... I know that's not going to happen but I'll make a start, because the rule says you don't beat yourself up about stuff.

(Sorry, some spoilers as the book is not really about what happens.)

So, 'I who have never known men' by Jacqueline Harpman was the most weird of reads, and seeing from Wiki that the author was a psychoanalyst explains it somewhat. We start in a bunker prison, in which forty women are held in a cage, without explanation, guarded by men who provide for and punish them but who never speak. It has been years, mostly they have forgotten the outside world. The book is narrated by the one younger woman; having been imprisoned as a child, she is the only one with some curiosity and desire to understand what is happening. She begins to measure time using her own heartbeat and becomes obsessed with watching a younger guard. Just when you begin to wonder where the story is going an alarm sounds and the guards abandon them, the keys in the lock. With some trepidation the women make their way up the stairs out of their bunker to find a strange empty world. 

The description of their existence in the cage was so unremittingly hopeless that I found it stressful and anxiety making simply to read; it was claustrophobic and terrifying in the extreme. The powerlessness and hopelessness, and yet they just lived on. And then they emerge into a world in which they are no less trapped and hopeless. The bunker is mysteriously supplied with electricity, food and water, but little else of use. And no information about the world and what became of it. After a time they decide to walk away, taking supplies. They find other bunker prisons, filled with the corpses of prisoners who had been abandoned without hope of escape. But nothing else. A world of isolated prisons. And in the end I read the book as a metaphor for the human condition, and an examination of what gives life meaning and makes us human. The young woman is almost devoid of personality as she has no experiences and no real connection to other human beings; they were forbidden to touch each other and my mind broke at the notion of such a lack of human contact. They struggle to make some kind of new existence outside but there is nothing in the world for them, so they are tied to the resources available at each of the prison bunkers that they find along the way. The young woman has a yearning to keep looking but the older women want to just settle and live, which is what they end up doing. Gradually, over years, the women die off, until she is alone, and she sets off wandering again.

So all you are left with is questions. Are they really any more free outside the prison? Are we, as people, trapped inside the society we have created, free? What is freedom? What makes a human society meaningful? It was all very existential.

Here, they discover the first of many prisons, it gives a good impression of the dispassionate nature of her telling, she is observing, with very little emotional engagement:

"It was the half-light of night-time, but I could see the cage: the floor was strewn with dead women. They seemed to be everywhere, lying across the mattresses, flung on top of each other, groups of them gripping the bars, in heaps, scattered in an appalling chaos. Some were naked, the dresses of others in tatters, they were in frightful attitudes, torments, their mouths and eyes open, their fists clenched as if they'd fought and killed one another in the madness from which death had snatched them.

Here, the siren had gone off in the middle of artificial night, the door was locked and the guards - of course! - hadn't bothered to open it. The women had tried. They'd died of grief, long before hunger killed them. Without food, furious and desperate, how many days had they spend clawing at the bars with their remaining strength, trying to prise open the lock without keys or tools, their fingers bleeding, trying to achieve the impossible - sick, crazed, lying down exhausted and then getting up again to attack there steel with their bare hands, screaming, crying, dazed, sometimes recovering their wits to contemplate their fate and flee to it in fury, and now they stank, distended, putrid and green, infested with maggots that swarmed over their decaying bodies, a grotesque image of the fate that could have been ours, had it not been for an incredible stroke of luck." (p.90-91)

Stay safe. Be kind.

The North Light

I have read 'The North Light' by Hideo Yokoyama for a book club this week at The House of Books and Friends and may pop back and edit if I find people there add something to my appreciation of the book. It is the story of Aose, an architect, who has designed a famous house, but who feels a bit stuck in his life, generally dissatisfied and unfulfilled. He is divorced and has a haphazard relationship with his daughter, seeming to spend time in coffee shops with her once a month. At work he seems to be doing mundane projects, just glad to have a job, after the much referenced economic bubble burst. When a new client asks him to reproduce his famous design for them he finds himself drawn back into the lives of his former clients, who appear to have left the famous Y residence unoccupied, apart from a single chair facing the north light window. 

Alongside his search for his elusive clients there is his relationship with his boss Okajima (usefully a list of dramatis personae is at the front of the book, though I did get accustomed to the Japanese names.) Okajima decides to enter a 'competition' to design a memorial gallery for a famous artist who has died, and this becomes a major subplot that introduces a lot of information about architecture. It was interesting because it's not often that the working life of the characters plays a significant part in a story. I have read so many novels about writers, or people with undefined occupations, or are in some kind of break from their normal working life. I guess it's because most people's jobs are quite boring. It wouldn't make much of a story to write about being a postie.

So Haruko Fujimiya, the dead painter is invented, but Bruno Taut, the designer of the chair, is a real German architect; I just love it when books have real people in them. Taut escaped Nazi Germany and spent a couple of years in Japan before the war, writing extensively about Japanese design and became very influential on modernist architecture. He only completed one project while he lived there but did teach and design and sell furniture. So the presence of the chair at the Y residence becomes some kind of symbol of his influence, but it is also linked to Aose's own story. 

The story is full of questions; who were the people, and why had they built a house and not moved in? and why did it now seem as if they had disappeared from the face of the planet? As Aose is forced to try and make sense of it, he is also forced to step outside his mundane concerns and think about who he is, why he is so perturbed by the house standing empty, and why he never built the house that he and his wife Yukari talked about. 

I have read quite a few Japanese books in the last year or so, and talking to Monkey sensei about life in Japan, I feel I am learning something about Japanese society and the cultural differences, which sometimes feel significant, and at other times remind you that the human experience is universal. It is about the yearning for connection, particularly in his relationship with his daughter. And I loved the description of the house, and its environment, and I found myself longing for the tranquility that it evoked.

I only noted one quote. In it Aose is travelling to visit the Y residence and on hearing a familiar birdsong is transported back to his childhood (an itinerant one with a father who worked in dam building):

"Tsu-tsu-pi, tsu-pi, tsu-pi ...
He couldn't see it, but it was probably a coal tit. The great tit had a similar call, but the tempo was faster and it sounded more like 'teacher, teacher, teacher'.
As he moved off again, he lowered the driver's side window slightly. The chill air caressed his cheek. He could hear more birdsong coming from a forest of silver birch trees. A winter bird, the Eurasian siskin. They stayed up there in the countryside until late spring, but their migration season was fast approaching. The call was higher pitched than usual, more urgent sounding, as if the bird was anxious to get on its way.
Aose felt his mind being hijacked by memories of birds and their songs. It was different from nostalgia. It overlapped with Aose's own family's pattern of migration. On his way to and from school, the chorus of birdsong overheard had been like rain falling, sometimes a comforting mist, sometimes pelting him with its malicious chant, 'Damn Kids! Damn Kids!' As he approached the temporary accommodation, the voices would fade away into the distance. As they neared completion, the giant dams that now loomed above the mountains had already swallowed up the woods and forests that had been sanctuaries for all kinds of wild birds." (p.56)

Stay safe. Be kind. Read some translation.

Lost Words (not an A to Z post)

I was excited to see 'Time Shelter' by Georgi Gospodinov on the International Booker shortlist having read 'Natural Novel' a few years ago. This book reminded me most strongly of Austerlitz as the main character tells a meandering story of his relationship with Gaustine. To begin with they recreate period specific spaces to help patients with Alzheimers, reproducing not just sights but sounds, smells and tastes from the past. The experiment works so well that other people want to try out the spaces. Then people, finding the present unbearable, start wanting to just live in the past permanently. The 'time shelters' are somewhere people feel safe. The whole things seems to snowball from there until, somewhat akin to Brexit, the countries of Europe take votes to decide what decade they would like to go back and live in. I have not captured anything about the book describing it like this. It is a book about memory and the role it plays for both individuals and society. 

From the beginning of the experiment:

"And so I traveled around, gathering up scents and afternoons, cataloging them. We need a precise and exhaustive description of which scent brings which memories back, what age it affects most strongly, which decade we could call forth with it. I described them in detail and sent my findings to Gaustine. In the clinic, scents could always be re-created when needed. Although some attempted to preserve the very molecules of a given scent, for Gaustine this was a waste of effort. It was much simpler and more authentic to toast a piece of bread or melt a bit of asphalt." (p.51)

Then at the end:

"First a few words disappeared. He turned it into a game, it was a long ago, they were still at the university. He told his wife and his friends those five or six disappearing words and when he needed one of them, they would prompt him - 'cornice,' 'mercantile,' 'rosemary,' 'confrontation'...

One day, perhaps because he had split up with his wife and had quit seeing his friends, and because the words were multiplying, he decided to write them down. At first a single piece of paper was sufficient, then both sides of a sheet of paper. Then another, and another ... Then he got himself a notebook. He called it A Brief Dictionary of the Forgotten. There was also a section for people's names. Gradually the number of sections increased - one for scents that reminded him of various things was added. Then one for sounds, he was going deaf on top of everything. (A doctor had told him that hearing loss and memory loss were related, they shared the same room in the brain.)

Finally yet another section appeared in the notebook, perhaps the most important of all - for that which had actually happened to him, so he could differentiate it from what he had read and from what he had invented.

Sooner or later everything would get mixed up - what had happened, what he had read, and what he had invented would jump up and switch places, until they gradually quieted down and faded away, but for now he was trying to hold the borders in place. Years later his ex-wife would line up for an autograph and he wouldn't be able to find her name in his head ..." (p.272-3)

'Greek Lessons' by Han Kang was similarly on my radar because of 'The Vegetarian' (from 2019). A nameless young woman is losing her son, and all her words, not forgotten but somehow trapped inside, unable to be spoken. She joins an evening class to learn Greek, making language an abstract thing that does not need to be spoken. The Greek teacher is losing his sight. Their lives are both empty but neither seems aware of their loneliness. Neither will admit to their weakness or ask for anything until circumstances force them together.

This is not those circumstances:

"There is a particular expression his face assumes when he addresses someone. His gaze humbly requests the other person's consent; there are occasionally times when something other than deference, something like an inexplicable, delicate sadness, haunts his look.

It was around thirty minutes before the lesson's start, and they were the only ones in the classroom. After taking her seat, she got out her textbook and writing things from her bag one by one, distractedly raised her head, and their eyes met. He stood up from his own chair, which was placed next to the lectern, and approached a desk that was a little distance from hers. After pulling out the chair and making space, he sat down facing the aisle. He raised both hands and lightly interlaced them in the air; it was just for a few moments, but she thought he was asking for a handshake. He was quiet for a while with his hands interlaced like that. As though he were making up his mind whether or not to address her and would let her know in due course. Not long afterwards there was the sound of footsteps in the corridor, and he stood up and went back to his place next to the lectern." (p.71-2)

I seem to have done a lot of very serious reading recently, and while it has been intellectually challenging it has not necessarily been enjoyable. So now I am reading 'The Long Earth' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter and enjoying it very much. I have also spent a lot of time doing puzzles and not reading, it is relaxing to the brain to focus on something abstract. I am waiting for the rain to stop so I can go outside and sort the yard. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Enjoy yourself.

A Guest is a Gift from God

Is a month long enough to have a half written blog post waiting around? Probably. So I will also tag on the end a list of the others that have also been read in the last month since I went to Devon.

'Elena Knows' by Claudia Piñeiro is not a detective novel. I keep reading that she is known for this genre, and while a death occurs and police are involved that is not what this book is about at all. Unless, I suppose, it is an investigation into a mother/daughter relationship. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize last year, probably how it appeared on my radar. Elena and her daughter Rita seem to have developed ones of those bickery but can't imagine life without you kind of relationships. We jump into their lives in the moments after Rita is found hanging in the church belfry and Elena insists that she did not commit suicide. She can't get the police to take her seriously, despite her repeated pestering, though the local detective placates the grieving mother by continuing to meet her and listen to her growing list of suspects. The main problem is that Elena has Parkinson's disease, and is incapacitated to a significant extent, and so realises she is going to need help with her investigation. There is only one person she can ask, who she feels owes Rita something, and the book follows her struggle to get to this person.

"Mum, enough, she said and she stood up, walked over to the stove, turned the flame to maximum, and set the pamphlets on fire. When the flame was about to burn her hand she let them fall, the charred pages fluttered to the green tile floor, landing beside the uncooked pieces of pasta that her mother had spilled.

Rita stood motionless watching the paper as it blazed, cracked, and danced until it changed colour, melted away, turned to ashes, and finally, went to the place that fire goes when it burns out." 

She despises Roberto, Rita's boyfriend, and his mother Mimi; here she is, under protest, having some beauty treatment, because Rita is disgusted by her hairy chin.

"Mimi said, your feet are a disaster, how do you even wear sandals with those heels? I just put them on, she answered, or Rita does it for me when I can't. At least put some lotion on them at night, Elena, that helps with the roughness. And even though Elena showed no concern for the roughness of her heels, Mimi said, I'm going to send you some calendula cream with Roberto. It'll just go to waste, Elena thought, because she wasn't willing to add any more chores to the unending list of daily challenges: walking, eating, going to the bathroom, lying down, standing up, sitting in a chair, getting up from a chair, taking a pill that won't go down her throat because her head can't tip back, drinking from a straw, breathing. No, she definitely wasn't going to put calendula cream on her heels." (p.98-99)

The pain and struggle she goes through to find out what really happened tells you more about her relationship with Rita than all the bickering. I liked her, she was so lacking in self-pity.

'Resistance' by Anita Shreve was a typical Anita Shreve picked up at Claire's house. I went through a bit of an Anita Shreve phase some years ago and loved her small town america stories. This one is set during World War Two however and concerns a shot down airman rescued by the French resistance. Lovely, atmospheric, and without the predictable ending, which was nice.

'Hard by a Great Forest' by Leo Vardiashvili, was won in a Caboodle competition and is not actually published until next year. Written by a Georgian writer about the war that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent exodus of the family concerned. It is a part of the world that I know little about and it was a real eye-opener. Forced to make hard choices and haunted by the people they left behind, many years after their departure Irakli returns to Tbilisi on unfinished business. When he vanishes both his sons follow in a desperate search to find the truth. Well worth looking out for.

Quote from near the end:

"But then I remember one night from my childhood. I was in a bed, all alone in an unfamiliar bedroom. We must have been visiting someone. Pools of darkness filled the corners of the room - perfect hiding places for some other family's monsters. I kept my eyes open owl-wide. There was no way I'd sleep.

Irakli appeared in the doorway, haloed by cigarette smoke and lamplight from the other room. He came and sat down, shifting the bed with his weight. He didn't say much, and what he did say I can't recall. Vague words of comfort. Faint smell of tobacco and wine on his breath.

He put a hand on my chest. And finally, I slept.

Laid out on the lumpy wet forest floor, I try to feel the weight of my father's hand on my chest." (p.216)

'Lonely Castle in the Mirror' by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel, was pressed on my by Monkey because she wanted someone to discuss it with. I was confused, because I thought it was going to have more fantasy element, but it turned out to be a bunch of lonely teenagers learning about real friendship via a magical mirror world. Not my usual kind of thing but we had some interesting chats about it anyway.

'Wild Things' by Laura Kay was a lovely comfort read for me. El decides to have a year of doing scary things. But then suddenly she and a bunch of friends buy a house together when one of them breaks up with a girlfriend and is going to abandon their plans. It's all very cosy about them getting to know the locals and making their house and garden into a home. The main character faces her fears and has some personal growth, that kind of sentimental stuff. Sappy and heartfelt. I like one of these occasionally.

Currently reading 'A Widow for a Year' by John Irving, and not sure how I feel about it. Life a little in flux at the moment and struggling to hold it together. Stay safe. Be kind.

Post script: 

'A Lost Lady' by Willa Cather, picked up in the charity shop on the basis of having enjoyed My Antonia, was a small story of a woman's vulnerability. A young boy watches and idolises a local beauty, watching as her life's fortunes change, feeling both protective and often angry at her poor choices. While it was interesting it was mostly as a study of patronising misogyny: Marian fails to live up to to Niel's idea of what a woman should be and how she should behave.

Disapperance (not an A to Z post)

I am currently spending time providing moral support for Monkey while she writes her dissertation (being a sounding board when necessary to discuss ideas and just keeping her company while she stares at the computer) so I plucked 'If Cats Disappeared From the World' by Genki Kawamura from her bookshelf to read. While she was in Fukuoka she wrote an extended essay on Cats in Japanese Literature and so has quite a collection of books featuring cats, some as important characters. The cat in this book is called Cabbage. It's a fairly low key tale of supernatural interference; a young man learns that he has a terminal illness, and the devil arrives in his home to offer a deal, extend his life in exchange for removing things from the world. But you can't just get rid of something nobody cares about, the devil wants something important in exchange for your 24 hours. It becomes something of a meditation on what is important in life as he debates what things he might be prepared to sacrifice, and it turns out that cats are quite important. 

"When I woke up I found that my eyes were filled with tears. It was still dark outside. I looked beside me where Cabbage normally slept and saw that he was gone. I panicked and jumped out of bed, my eyes scanning the room. Then I saw Cabbage curled up asleep at the foot of the bed. As usual I hadn't slept well. But I was relieved to find Cabbage was still there. The memory of the night before when Aloha suggested eliminating cats was still fresh in my mind.

So what would it be like? My life or cats? At that moment, I couldn't imagine what my life would be like without Cabbage. Four years had passed since my mother had died. Cabbage had always been by her side. How could I erase him? What was I supposed to do?" (p.158)

So while it is partly about his relationships with the significant human beings in his life, one of the most significant relationships is with Cabbage. Maybe it is also about how one comes to terms with the notion of impending death. Nothing much happens, because, in reality, what can you do if you find you are dying other than say goodbye. Oh yes, he's also a postman, so what's not to love.

Stay safe. Be kind. Contemplate existence, and disappearance.

Diary of a Void

'Diary of a Void' by Emi Yagi. One of Monkey's lecturers talked about this book and she decided to buy it for me for Christmas. It is the story of Shibata who, frustrated by the way her male colleagues treat her, one day randomly announces she is pregnant and thus cannot clean up the coffee cups as the smell makes her sick. She is not pregnant, but she makes a pretty good job of being, and the experience improves her life considerably; she can go home early and is excused the various jobs that were previously left to her. The simplest thing to do would be to have a pretend miscarriage, but no, she enjoys going home early and having time to cook nice dinners and take care of herself, so she just keeps up the pretence. So you spend much of the book wondering how she gets away with it, and how the situation will pan out when the baby is supposed to arrive. She starts walking because she is worried about putting on weight, then joins a pregnant lady exercise group ... and even goes to the doctor in the end. She appears quite lonely and enjoys the friendship of the other pregnant women, so enjoys sharing the experience with them that it seems to become real for her. I was not sure what to make of it but I enjoyed the book and believed with her that she was pregnant. It was well and truly surreal. I give you this quote from her first experience of the exercise class:

"Utterly dominated by the thudding music, everybody was dancing madly, but the one who was dancing the maddest was the woman in the neon-blue shirt. While everybody else looked sapped, barely managing to keep up with the instructor, she let out a roar like an animal, her breasts shaking like a pair of fruits as she sensually thrust out her belly over and over. It was like she was dancing at some harvest festival. The more she moved, the faster the beat seemed to get.

The heat of the room entered my lungs, and just when I thought my arms and legs were about to fall off, the fierce beat came to a stop and gave way to the mellow sounds of harp arpeggios. Our steps got slower and slower; the mirror ball stopped spinning. The next thing I knew, all these women with round bellies were on their backs and bathing in a soft green light as if we were suddenly in some kind of forest. Deep breaths, everybody. In and out, in and out.

Have a great evening! Get home safe! The kanpyo lady called out as we exited the gym. Up ahead, walking towards the subway, I noticed the woman in the neon-blue shirt. With every step she took, her thick braids swung from side to side.

It was getting dark. The Sunday evening air was crisp and cool. But when I closed my eyes, my eyelids felt hot. There was something warm moving inside me.

As I waited for the light to change, I pulled out my phone and opened Baby-N-Me. I plugged in today's exercise: MOMMY AEROBICS, 50 MIN." (p.109-111)

Stay safe. Be kind. That's enough baby stuff for the time being.

Weird Norwegian Drama

I read this review in the Guardian before crimbo about Vigdis Hjorth. The library had a copy of 'Long Live the Post Horn!' which I ordered, but Claire bought 'Is Mother Dead?' for mum so I will get to read that one later this year when I acquire it. Anyway, who doesn't enjoy a nice novel about the Norwegian postal service. It's good to see that the same issues concern Norwegian posties as British posties. If anything their role as a link for remote rural communities is even more significant. I guess people in urban areas do not consider our presence significant but there are still lots of parts of the country where the postal system is a connection to and reminder of the wider world.

Our heroine Ellinor, who narrates the story, is going through something of an existential crisis, exacerbated by the sudden disappearance and then death of a work colleague. But this results in her taking over his project working for the Norwegian Post and Communications Union that is trying to raise some awareness about the ramifications of a EU postal directive. Alongside this there is her weird love affair that seems somewhat non committal, and her family, whom she seems very fond of but finds disconcerting. So her struggle for meaning is set against the backdrop of the fight against the undermining of the postal system. 

We'll start with some existential angst (Dag is the friend who died):

"I had realised the importance of everything that had been Dag just when everything that was Dag ended. With the benefit of hindsight, I grasped the magnitude of the loss. I went home to bed and wanted to dream, but never sank into the stage where dreams are shaped, and tomorrow's to-do list played on a loop behind my eyes. I could already feel the exhaustion I would feel in the morning because I had missed out on my dream sleep, it tensed my jaw. The stiffness in my back, my footsteps out of the bedroom, the cold floor, the stream into the lavatory and the water, my face in the mirror where all my ridiculous worried had embedded themselves into my forehead. Shower and shampoo in my hair, soap between my legs, under my arms, every morning, every morning. To get dressed and yet not suit myself. Wishing my wardrobe contained something else, to be surprised and then not be surprised, and yet not wear my best clothes in order not to wear them out. Save the best for later. For some day. My most expensive lingerie saved for something that would never happen, which I knew would never happen, which I didn't even hope would happen, and still I waited for the future, the future, for something which would never happen, for the world, such as it was, to change. Then it was morning and I got up to do what i had imagined, practically already lived. Thus I was able to live out the day before I actually lived it and get tired before the actual tiredness set in and not realise the significance of what was happening until afterwards, I was out of sync with myself." (p57-8)

I felt that the book became something of an ode the the postal service and she finds something of an epiphany when she comes to understand it better and care about the outcome of the vote. Here, long quote, sorry, but part of a lovely story a postman tells of his attempts to find an address for a stranded letter:

" 'A letter writer who trusted the Post Office to come to her rescue. Who took a chance and crossed her fingers. Minor details such as a lack of street name or house number didn't stop her writing, so urgent was her business, so great her faith in the Post Office. When there was no reply, she took another chance. Might it be a brave marriage proposal? Information about a child that Helge Brun didn't know he had? The more I examined them, the more I became convinced that the letters were important. Postal workers have strong intuitions, I don't need to tell you that and as it happens, I was proved right'

A buzz of excitement rippled through the room. Go on?

Rudolf Karena Hansen paused rhetorically. Rolf raised his hand, then looked at the postal workers and dropped it.

Their ears had pricked up, their eyes were shining, hanging on Rudolf Karena Hansen's every word, captivated by the tale of Helge Brun, identifying strongly with the narrator and his mysterious letters. Yesterday Rolf had told them to write down 'reliability' because the media wants something people can relate to, but what's the use of knowing what the media wants if you don't know the postal workers?

'From that moment on,' Rudolf Karena Hansen continued, 'I didn't just put letters into the right post boxes when I was out on my round. I knocked on doors and struck up conversations with any old people who were at home in the morning and children who were home alone after school and had time to chat with a trusted postman. I asked about Helge Brun and although no one could point me in his direction, it was the start of a fascinating period in my life. I heard many small stories which together made up a new and bigger story, the story of our district told from different points of view. Details and incidents I had never heard about, but which had had life-changing consequences for the individuals and the community, I gained a better understanding of how people live together and how they depend on one another. Everything made sense and though my round now took twice as long as it used to, and the postmaster wondered at times what I was doing, I did everything I was supposed to and more, and in the evening I sat in the office between piles of dead letters into which I tried to breathe life.' " (p78-9)

If I have piqued your curiosity you will have to read and find out if he ever found the recipient for the wayward letters. I loved the notion of breathing life into dead letters. We send away boxes and boxes every day. They are mostly junk mail, people gone away, but I always sort through the ones that make their way into the cage, and anything that is hand written I always check to find out where it might belong, correct the postcode or fill in a missing blank and sometimes manage to send things on their way.

Stay safe. Be kind. Breathe life.

Train books and some ...

This much procrastinated post will be a race through the books that I have read over the last two months because the pile is now so tall it teeters. 'Girl, Woman, Other' by Bernadine Evaristo won the Booker in 2019 and has been on the TBR list since then. It is a tangled tale of many women, their lives, and how the world changed around them and with them. It was very readable and the characters engaging but I was not bowled over by it, but what I did appreciate was that it managed to be political and thought provoking without being self-conscious with it. Here, Carole (and I kind of liked her lack of punctuation, it was stylistically interesting and informal):

"she's used to clients and new colleagues looking past her to the person they are clearly expecting to meet

she will stride up to the client, shake his hand firmly (yet femininely), while looking him warmly (yet confidently) in the eye and smiling innocently, and delivering her name unto him with perfectly clipped Received Pronunciation, showing off her pretty (thank-god-they're-not-too-thick) lips coated in a discreet shade of pink, baring her perfect teeth as he adjusts to the collision between reality and expectation, and tries not to show it while she assumes control of the situation and the conversation" (p.117)

A charity shop unread copy of 'Piranesi' by Susanna Clarke (which won the Women's Fiction Prize in 2021) was an utterly different kind of read. In a strange hidden world that consists entirely of vast rooms of statues lives Piranesi; he lives off fish and seaweed and things brought to him occasionally by the 'Other'. How does he come to be here, and who is this person who comes and goes? All will be revealed, as his own curiosity it piqued by strange occurrences that force him to rethink everything he thinks he remembers about his own life. A clever book and intriguing... but it reminded me so forcefully of something else I have read that uses a similar scenario, and I cannot remember what it is. Frustrating.

"The World (so far as I can tell) does not bear out the Other's claim that there are gaps in my memory.

While he was explaining it to me - and for some time afterwards - I did not know what to think. At several points I experienced a feeling akin to panic. Could it really be the case that I had forgotten whole conversations?

But as the day went on, I could find no evidence of memory loss to support the Other's claim. I busied Myself with my ordinary, everyday tasks. I mended one of my fishing nets and worked on my Catalogue of Statues. In the early evening I went to the Eighth Vestibule to fish in the Waters of the Lower Staircase. The Beams of the Declining Sun shone through the Windows of the Lower Halls, striking the Surface of the Waves and making ripples of golden Light flow across the Ceiling of the Staircase and over the Faces of the Statues. When night fell, I listened to the Song that the Moon and Stars were singing and I sang with them." (p70-71)

What a varied selection I realise I have read as I list them. Next up, 'Doggerland' by Ben Smith, set in a not-so-distant future where there is a lot of sea, and life seems to be controlled by a 'company', and the boy has been sent to work maintenance on an offshore windfarm (the title made me assume it was a reference to Dogger Bank in the shipping forecast), obliged to take on a job abandoned by his father. It is grim and meaningless and his only companion is the old man, who does little work and disappears regularly on mysterious fishing trips. It has much of the atmosphere of 'The Road'; the greyness, the claustrophobic atmosphere, the sense of hopeless helplessness and powerlessness, though there is less drama, the boy and the old man exist in a timeless vacuum. But the boy is obsessed with what happened to his father and the old man drops hints, but in reality has his own agenda to which the boy is irrelevant. And it manages something similar in that you root for the boy, you want him to win, he tempts you to hope for the future, and again, I'm warning you ... don't. 

"The old man's hand hovered over the tin on his left, then switched sides and picked upon from his right. He took a penknife from his pocket and scraped round the rim, clearing away the rust and dirt. He blew off the power residue, then got up, went to the sink and came back with the tin opener. He sat back down and fitted it to the top of the tin, jolting it around until the wheel bit into the lid.

The boy watched the old man closely. He was turning the handle too fast, so that the wheel kept slipping off the tin; and then he would mutter something, fit it back on and start again. There were streaks of power rust on the table and on his hands.

The old man turned the handle again but it didn't move. He tried to take the tin opener off but it stuck. 'Bloody thing's broken.'" (p.88)

'When we cease to understand the world' by Benjamin Labatut is a fictionalised version of the lives of a selection of the world's most astounding mathematical minds. Not traditionally fodder for a novel, but just go with it. Some I had heard of, Schrodinger, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, some not, Grothendieck, Louis de Broglie, but what they had in common was their utter obsession with their subjects. The book sank periodically into descriptions of how they worked so hard they forgot to eat and sleep until it drove them out of their minds. I felt like I learned quite a lot from it, about physics and mathematics, and about the pursuit of esoteric knowledge.

"Most nights he fell prey to insomnia. In his delirium, his mood would establish strange connections that allowed him to achieve direct results, foregoing intermediate steps. He felt his brain split in two: each hemisphere worked on its own, without needing to communicate with the other, and as a result his matrices violated all the rules of ordinary algebra and obeyed the logic of dreams, where one thing can be many: he was capable of adding two quantities together and obtaining different answers depending on the order in which he proceeded. Three plus two was five, but two plus three might be ten. Too weary to question himself, he continued working until he had reached the final matrix. When he solved it, he left his bed and ran around his room sorting, 'Unobservable! Unimaginable! Unthinkable!' until the entire hotel was awakened. Frau Rosenthal entered in time to see him collapse on the floor and recoiled at the stench of his soiled pyjama bottoms. When she managed to calm him, she put him back to bed and ran off to fetch a doctor, paying no attention to his complaints, as he was passing in and out of his hallucinations." (Heisenberg, P.104)

I read most of this book on the train south and then abandoned it in favour of lighter reading that I found on a table in Claire's living room.

What I found most interesting about 'An Unequal Stillness' by Francesca Kay was the striking contrast between the life of her 'genius' artist and that of the scientists in the previous book. The men in Labatut's book were free to do nothing but pursue their obsession, real life barely seemed to exist for them, the practicalities of existence were provided by the women around them, but in this book Jennet must juggle her family and domestic responsibilities, snatching time for her real work where she can. I find myself annoyed by stories of women who pander to and continually forgive alcoholic husbands, but to be honest he was not that important to the story, she got on with things in spite of him. While I found the descriptions of her paintings rather annoying, because I was visualising them and wanted to see them, the writing was engaging and had some wonderful moments:

"Scouring out a cast-iron pot at the kitchen sink, Jennet stops to watch the reflection of a light above it glinting in the greasy water and her own hands submerged. Out of nowhere a wave of fear crashes over her and she is suddenly quite sure she will never lift her hands out of the water or unglue her feet from the floor. Only her wildly pounding heart is evidence of life. Otherwise she might as well be paralysed, like Lot's wife trapped in salt. Somewhere in the distance there is a baby crying, but Jennet cannot go to it. She cannot move at all. She must stand there forever with her hands beneath the water in the blackened pot."

'Ice Cream' is a book of short stories by the inimitable Helen Dunmore, read on the train on the way back north, in one sitting. Her writing is always so perfect, little vignettes of people's lives, capturing something that is essential to being human. Here, a lighthouse keeper's wife:

"The bed was too big when she lay alone in it. He was an off-shore lighthouseman and she knew that when she married him. If the lighthouse tender couldn't land to change the crew on relief day, Nancy might be waiting for him another week. Often the weather was bad when it came to changeover. He'd watch the wall of white foam crash against the glass and know he wasn't going to get off. But Nancy stood it. She had her little garden. She didn't flinch. She knew the fishing boats and would stand to watch them go out around the point, her skirts blown back against her legs, moulded to them by the wind. He was glad there was no one else to see her like that. She fed her garden with fish-meal and rotted-down seaweed, and when the salt-storms burnt off the leaves of her spinach and lettuces, she planted again. He would see her kneeling on the path, skirts bunched under her, tamping the seedlings in with her quick fingers." (p.56-57)

Then I came home and picked 'Where'd You Go Bernadette' by Maria Semple from the TBR pile in my room. You'd think I was sick of books about geniuses ... and yes, I think I am now. I have read lots of wonderful, well written and still engaging stories that are about ordinary people, living mostly unremarkable lives, but some writers just can't resist making their characters over-achievers, and I find them much less relatable. And this is a book with emails and hashtags and all manner of 21st century social media stuff, but I managed to get past that and just enjoy the mystery. So Bernadette is a genius who has plainly had a mental breakdown and her husband just seemed to have ignored it for a decade. That kind of trope annoys me to. Do people really just live so far up their own arse that they don't notice someone they love fall to pieces? (Turns out he is a bit of an arsehole so no surprise). So there was a lot to forgive in the book but I still managed to enjoy it, because she writes about the breakdown in a very real way and gets inside Bernadette's head so well, so we give her brownie points for that. Here, Bernadette's thoughts:

"What you've heard about the rain: it's all true. So you'd think it would be part of the fabric, especially among lifers. But every time it rains, and you have to interact with someone, here's what they'll say: 'Can you believe the weather?' And what you want to say, 'Actually, I can believe the weather. What I can't believe is that I'm actually have a conversation about the weather.' But I don't say that, you see, because that would be instigating a fight, something I try my best to avoid, with mixed results.

Getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Not getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Even sleeping makes my heart race! I'm lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It's a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organised but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. for instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee's lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes I'VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE'S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racer grinding away in the corner. This is energy I will need to get through the next day. But I lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope of a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. I wake up in a sweat so thorough I sleep with a pitcher of water by the bed or I might die of dehydration. (p.129-130)

So that was the pile, though I have already finished another, that I think might get more than two lines. All enjoyable in their own way and a nicely mixed bunch.

I left behind in Devon some unfinished business, but Claire managed to complete it ... and then take it back to the charity shop:

Oh yes, Monkey is home:

and we have been stepping over the suitcase in the living room for a week, but then we are experts at that, having lived with two bags of compost in the kitchen for a month (you stop noticing them after a while):

Stay safe. Be kind. Step around life's obstacles.