Tag: fiction

PIRANESI by Susanna Clark

This is a strange book and FYI this post will be chock-full of SPOILERS.  It opens with a man living in a mysterious flooded mansion that is full of statues.  It is so large that he has never found the end.  There is only one other person who he sometime sees there, who he calls ‘the Other,’ and who sometimes brings him modern items (e.g., sneakers) but everything else he must forage for himself out of the tides that crash into the halls.   There are also thirteen skeletons, in different parts of the House, and he has developed a strange religion involving caring for the skeletons and worshipping the statues.  It sounds sad but actually he is rather happy, and has a full life engaging with the beauties of the House. 

Eventually he is rescued by a police officer, and we find out that he is a journalist, who (in a past he has now forgotten) was trapped by the Other, an occultist, in this parallel universe.  He goes back to the ‘real world,’ and – this is right at the end of the book – this is where I found it really rather lovely.  You’d think he would be happy to be back in ‘reality,’ but he misses the beauties of the House, and he brings to our reality this same kind of simple delight in the beauty of what he sees.  I think this book, while full of plot, is really a triumph of narrative voice, offering us a different, and frankly better, way of living in the world.  A way of loving the streets and trash cans and commuters like they were marble statues.

TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson

Well this is an almost depressingly fantastic novella. It’s an eerie and beautiful story about a railway worker in Idaho in the early twentieth century.

It’s kind of frustrating for anyone to be this amazing as a writer. I looked him up and I see that he was widely acknowledged as the ‘big talent’ of his generation of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I note I must be a bad person because I was almost relieved (!?!) to see he became a drug addict. He still went on to write more though, and apparently this is not even his best book! That is apparently something called JESUS SON. I haven’t ordered it yet because I almost dread finding out how good it is.

DADDY ISSUES by Kate Goldbeck

I really liked this author’s previous book, YOU, AGAIN, which managed the difficult task of novel-as-romcom. This one I didn’t like nearly as much. It’s just wild, and shows you how much of a mystery writing is. Even if you can do it once, it doesn’t mean you can do it again. Or at least not for this particular reader.

THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Ben Markovitz

This book was shortlisted for the Booker, which made me hesitant. Typically the Booker indicates a book I will hate. But I decided to give it a go, because I loved the pitch: a man goes to drop his daughter off at college, and then just keeps driving.

It’s turns out to be a book about how weirdly free you are in the second half of your life; probably free-er than you were when you were young, and were burdened by having to make money and be a success and get married and oh god I feel stressed just thinking about it.

There was tons of stuff I really liked about this book. Here’s the daughter, arriving in her college town for her first day:

The city she had visited once before was about to become a permanent four-year landmark in her life story, and in the face of that fact you’re kind of helplessly the person you were beforehand.

And here is the dad, meeting a friend who he hasn’t seen in years:

If I looked hard I could see, under his old face, the shape of someone more elderly starting to push through

And here was one that made me really laugh, about what happened to be on the TV:

. . . Friends seemed to be on back to back. It’s like the weather these days, always going on in the background.

I’m sorry to tell you that he does actually escape SPOILER ALERT because he gets weird chest pains and it turns out he has a heart issue so his wife flies out to get him. And then the book abruptly ends. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean, but it’s been haunting me.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan

Here is a classic American novel set in a small town in Ohio. It follows two married couples across a few decades. I was enjoying it, until I wasn’t. I got to page 382 and then abruptly decided to quit. It’s hard to explain why. It was well written, it had a plot, but somehow it just seemed very ordinary, and like my reading time would be better spent elsewhere. Can’t think when else I’ve quite a book this late on this slender a reasoning.

HEART THE LOVER by Lily King

I read this in on one long and sleepless night. I really enjoyed it. It tells about a woman’s long relationship with her university boyfriend. Let me give you a taste. Here is the boyfriend, talking about his mother:

“We are not the same species, Yash said once. I am a human being and she is a two-ton albatross. She wants things from me I cannot give.”

At the end, SPOILER ALERT, she spends a few days with him in hospital as he dies of lung cancer. I cried myself silly.

The next day was very strange. I felt like I was living in two realities, my own, and the one in the book. I guess these days it’s rare I read a novel straight through.

FAN SERVICE by Rosie Danan

This was a charming romcom about a woman, Alex, who falls in love with a werewolf. It’s fun and genre-y, and also a pretty clever metaphor for learning to live with things you can’t control. 

Alex was obsessed as a teenager by a TV show about a werewolf, and was the moderator of the show’s main wiki.  I actually found this part of the book deeply reassuring.  I always wonder if I am too online, and this made me realize that really I’m not – other people are way, way, way more online than I am.  I could barely understand some of the references.  Hurray!

WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan

On the one hand, I did not finish this book. I bailed about 200 pages in. On the other hand, I kind of enjoyed it. It tells the story of a professor of literature in 2130, whose specialist period is 1990 to 2030.

The first interesting part was how overwhelmed he is, and the whole academy is, by how much material our era left. The reality TV, the emails, the messaging, etc etc. Its wild how much more info we leave behind than people before the internet.

The second interesting part was the world. It is a globally warmed world, so the UK is just a series of islands, and they have very few species – just eight butterflies. Its not as if the professor does not know how good the past was, but it’s not as if he thinks he lives in a dystopia. And it made me wonder: we all know we live in a very reduced natural world; how strange we don’t think we live in a dystopia.

It’s also a post-nuclear war world, so there is very little global trade. They look back on our world as a world of wild and extravagant luxury. So perhaps we should think we live in a utopia. I don’t know.

The plot was kind of questionable, all about trying to find a lost poem, and at some point we switched back into our present with the poet, so maybe it was all going to make sense, but I can’t tell you as I gave up.

GHOSTROOTS by Pemi Aguda

Here is speculative horror fiction from Nigeria.  Unfortunately, it’s short stories, which I always struggle to get into.  However they were skilful stories.  I liked, for example, the description of a woman   “who is stroking her blond wig as if it were a living thing, a pet that needs comfort”

I also really enjoyed the way she evoked contemporary Nigeria, very dense and real.  This I thought was an interesting part, about a girl whose parents will not tell her anything about her grandparents:

“But what do Nigerian parents tell their children about their own parents?  Especially the Pentecostal Christians? Nothing.  If you took a poll of your friends, three out of five would be similarly ignorant of these histories of parents who moved from somewhere to Lagos, left behind religions and curses and distant cousins and grimy pasts”

That first generation who moves to town, who goes from nine kids to two, in any country, is an interesting one.

Nigeria is generally kind of an extreme place, and it makes for a fun setting for speculative fiction. One charter fears she is the reincarnation of her evil grandmother, and she asks her “coworkers if they believe in reincarnation.  Five of them believe. Two of them claim to have corroborative stories.” One of them feels she is a reincarnation – of Beyonce.

THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF by Helen Garner

I chose this book on impulse because Amazon recommended it to me. I had just read a book by the same aurhor, her first, which is why the algorithm though I might like it. That one was a deeply personal memoir of her life in a commune with her junkie boyfriend. This one is wildly different, being a straightforward piece of courtroom reportage.

It was pretty interesting. It tells the real life trial of an Australian man who drove his three children into a dam. They were drowned, but he survived. He claimed he had a coughing fit. His ex, and his family, all testified in his defense, saying he loved his children and would never have killed them. He was also however in the middle of an apparently amicable divorce – his wife was leaving him for the contractor who was doing up their house – and it became increasingly clear over the course of the trial that this mild-manner man in this polite divorce had actually murdered the children to get his revenge.

The story in itself was pretty interesting, but what really elevated it was Garner’s clear, lucid writing, and her close observation of how ‘justice’ actually gets served. The part that I can’t get over is that these poor kids were found unbuckled. It looks like the five year old unbuckled the two year old’s car seat, and the eight year old actually managed to get the window down; but just not quite in time to escape.