Tag: fiction

THE MISSIONARY’S WIFE by Tim Jeal

Here is a story about a missionary’s wife. It’s set in the 1890s in Zimbabwe around the time of the first Chimurenga. I’ve read Tim Jeal’s work before – I love his biography of Stanley – but I was sort of torn about this one.

On the one hand, it is kind of stilted. Here is the wife, shortly after she gets married to the missionary, in her home town of Sarston in the UK: “Their lovemaking became for her not just the greatest pleasure in her life but a perfect expression of their real union.” M’kay.

On the other hand, it was full of interest. The wife’s mind is completely blown when she finds out that the locals allegedly rub bats’ dung into their labia to make them as long as bats’ wings. She tried to ‘imagine such things being mentioned in Sarston. People would faint at the very idea.’ I am doubtful this was ever the case, but I think it is super interesting to imagine what it must have been like for both sides of that wild first meeting of cultures.

Eventually it turns into an adventure story, and then unexpectedly a love story, and I enjoyed it in the end. It did make sad to think how little historical fiction there is, not just about Zimbabwe, but about Africa as a whole. So big thanks to Tim Jeal for adding to the small pile, ‘perfect expression of real unions’ aside.

I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue

This book has a fun premise, asking what would happen if you suddenly got access to all your colleagues mails and slacks. WHAT POWER!

This basic idea could have gone in a lot of different directions. I thought it might be an unhinged story about revenge, which probably says a lot about me. But actually it was much sweeter. It was about a girl who is self-absorbed, and getting a chance to see how other people really feel helps her focus outside herself for the first time in many years.

It’s interesting because her self-absorption is sort of sympathetic, in that what she is really absorbed in is guilt about the death of a friend. But even so, what you get is that self absorption is self absorption, and whatever its cause, it makes you unhappy.

I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman

This book begins with a girl trapped in a cage with 39 women. The woman are not allowed to express feelings or to touch each other. It is unclear why they are there. They have vague memories of some kind of calamity (fire, screaming, running) but seem to have been drugged, as they cannot remember much of their lives before. It’s all very strange – they don’t even seem to be on a standard cycle – for example, food comes at odd hours for no reason, and the lights never change. Then one day SPOLIER ALERT an alarm goes off just as they are about to be fed, so the guards run away with the keys in the door, and so they are able to escape.

They emerge into an empty plain, and go searching. They SPOILER ALERT find multiple other bunkers, all with cages with 40 people in them, always gender segregated, always dead. AND GUYS THAT’S IT. They never learn any more about why they are there and what it all means. The other women all die as they are much older than the child; and then she spends many years alone.

It is just wild: imagine living your whole life not knowing why things are the way they are. Why are you there? Where even are you? What does it all mean? When she knows she is dying, she sets herself up sitting bold and unafraid. I was like, wow, imagine dealing with a life that is such a mystery. Then I thought, I guess I know someone else who has to do that, which is all of us.

The Introduction seemed to think this book was a lot about gender, but I did not get that at all. For me it was more about meaninglessness, which is pretty gender neutral. It was a very short book, but I find I keep thinking about it. It’s somehow flicked a switch in how I think about my own life, and the courage it takes to live it.

THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES by John Byrne

This book is in the grand tradition of books that try to do a life end-to-end. It was engaging and I enjoyed it, skipping through 700+ pages in no time. But somehow it has not stayed with me hardly at all. God, writing is crazy. Readers are so difficult! If I was this author I would be like: WTF! WHAT DO YOU WANT WOMAN?!? And to be fair I guess I don’t know.

One thing I did take from this book was that Ireland was rough in the 1950s. This seems to be a trend of this year, because I got the same message loud and clear from LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor, from SMALL THINGS LIKE THIS by Claire Keegan, and etc. Ireland 1950s needs to up its PR budget

BORED GAY WEREWOLF by Tony Santorella

This book had a fun premise, in which a twenty-something slacker who is incidentally a werewolf gets sucked into a dodgy self-help movement. But then it went a bit sideways, and kind of trite, complete with fight scenes and ‘found family.’ I am not sure where I wanted this book to go, but it was not that way. But it was fun in any case.

THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA by Ray Nayler

I gave up on this book, but I still enjoyed it. The 300 pages I did read were jam-packed with ideas. Basically it asks the horrifying question on what would happen if octopuses acquired our level of intelligence. This I consider a really big concern. Because let’s say dolphins did, or parrots, they don’t have opposable digits, so basically nbd. But octopi have four times our number of opposable digits! Its set in the far future, and is one of the few really believable far futures I’ve ever read. There’s a slave ship for scraping the last protein from the ocean, which has slaves on it because they are cheaper than robots, there’s a cyborg whose feelings are hurt because academics can’t agree if he is conscious or not, there’s customized hologram boyfriends, and that’s before the octopi get super intelligent.

There’s also a cool part about how our brain floats around in total dark, and our whole sense of the world comes from electrical impulses sent to it in its black chamber. I love this image.

LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor

I liked another book by this author, FELICIA’S JOURNEY. It was all about a poor Irish girl trapped by her society. It didn’t like this one nearly as much. It was also about a poor Irish girl trapped by her society. It started to make me feel like this guy just likes torturing poor Irish girls. This one was particularly grim. It’s about a girl brought up in a Catholic orphanage who goes out to be a maid and marries her employer and then SPOILER ALERT falls in love with a young man. From page 1 you just know that this isn’t going to be a story about finding happiness or escape. You just know everything’s going to turn out bad. And I just don’t have the tolerance for it. It’s almost like gratuitously miserable.

WE HEXED THE MOON by Mollyhall Seeley

Here is a book the author describes as being about: “four best friends who fuck around with The Moon and then very quickly Find Out about The Moon.” As you can maybe tell, it is a triumph of voice, and specifically GenZ voice.

The friends do a spell that pulls the moon from the sky.. The moon then comes to their house and wants answers. This plot, while wild, is really neither here not there. What matters is the vibe. Let me not talk about it, let me just quote extensively from the first page:

“Twitter is crumbling, fittingly, into a timeline of what is no longer called Tweets, now called Xs. Twitter is dead & so is nature, probably. Jen’s never having kids. That’s what Jen’s college application was about, framed through a lens of climate grief, ‘the sense of loss that arises from experiencing or learning about environmental destruction or climate change.’ Jen’s college counselor thought grief was a very powerful world. She said Why say grief and not sadness & Jen said Sadness is local, grief is cosmic. Global heating. Universal heating, maybe, who knows. So Jen’s not having kids but she is going to Yale.”

I’ve never read a book quite like it. I can’t say I know what it was ‘about’ – my female friendship? I didn’t care about the characters or anything like that, but I don’t think that was the point.

VIOLET CLAY by Gail Goodwin

I don’t know why this wonderful book is not more famous. I loved it. It tells about a woman trying to be an artist, and covers the terrible fear and dread of that activity better than anything I’ve ever read. Apparently there is a name for the coming-of-age novel of an artist, and it is kunstelrroman, and this is considered by some to be the first female one. (How do we feel about that this only happens in 1978?)

The book is written from the perspective of her early 30s, and covers her confidence as she graduates college (she won a college prize!), to the hard road of the next ten years, during which she has to do commercial illustration, and does less and less of her actual art. She has a LOT of casual sex (is this what the 70s was like? Does not seem hygenic), and suffers very much over how she is intentionally wasting her time and distracting herself from the fact that she is failing – not just in the world’s eyes, but in her own. She is interested in the dates of birth of famous artists, so she can calculate their age at the time of their first big success, and give herself hope that it is not too late for her.

Try this: “New York from across the river resumed the manageable proportions of a maquette, a harmless little table model on which I could project my dreams. It had looked like this when I rode the Carey bus into its center nin years ago from Newark. I still felt the old twinge when I looked at it now. I still wanted to leave my mark on it, even though it had left so many marks on me.”

Substitute London for New York, and I hear you Gail Goodwin, god I hear you. I see this author is still alive and was last published in 2020, so I am for sure going to read more.

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA by Yukio Mishima

Here is a book for boys, and especially the sort of boys who are interested in Japan. It starts off strong, with a 13 year old boy figuring out how to watch his mother undressing in her bedroom. She gets a sailor for boyfriend, so soon he is seeing more than this, and in particular the sailor’s ‘temple tower.’ (?!?)

The boy is in a creepy gang, and they SPOILER ALERT murder a kitten. I cannot tell you too much about this part because I skipped it. The boyfriend becomes a step-dad, and when he catches the boy peeping, does not beat him but has a healthy conversation with him about it. The boy is horrified, thinking this is unmanly, and so his creepy gang plans to SPOLIER ALERT murder the sailor.

Why?! What was the point of this?!? I am not sure. However, I enjoyed this description of a ship’s horn: “a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale’s back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. “