Category: reviews

Why no one reads books anymore: a portrait.

Posted on by minorhistory

The Literature Express by Lasha Bugadze

a white rabbit living beside a petrol station

Works of Georgian literature in translation are few and far between. The English-speaking world appears to have little interest in classical or emerging writers from the Caucasus region. Lasha Bugadze’s The Literature Express was the first Georgian novel I’ve encountered in English. I picked it up in the museum shop at a Karlo Kacharava exhibition. If there had been other Georgian novels in English, I would have picked them up too. 

The Literature Express follows the trials of a short-story writer Zaza, who has been selected to represent Georgia along with a poet Zviad on a European-wide train journey of literary figures from the different European nations. While Zviad is quite well known and widely published, Zaza has published one collection of short stories that did not sell well. Zaza’s selection for the literary expedition ruffled feathers in Georgia. Many posited that his mother’s position as Vice President of the Georgian Chess Federation motivated his selection over more-established and well-published writers. 

The novel begins in Tbilisi sometime after the Russian invasion of Georgia and subsequent occupation of north-Georgian territories starting in August 2008. The story also starts at the end of Zaza’s relationship with Elene, who seemed to have been aware she was wasting her time paying rent and living to serve a man-child. Despite the dysfunctions of their relationship, it took Zaza sleeping with another woman he met on Skype for Elene to leave him. Georgian women are not portrayed as having high expectations from their men: Zaza’s own father’s attitudes and behaviour parallel his own, with his mother functioning as the only adult in the family.

The train journey starts in Lisbon and ends for the Georgians in Poland because they cannot obtain Russian visas due to the fallout from the war. The other passengers continue as far as Moscow, later regrouping with the Georgians in Warsaw and then onward to a ceremony in Berlin where they announced the winner of a literature contest the organisers had set for the passengers along their journey. 

Zaza, our narrator, makes little effort with anyone around him. No one is worth getting to know. He is cynical about the entire exercise and quite misanthropic. Zaza seems shocked and disgusted that other writers on the train write. He does not write much in the novel, even after the announcement of a literary competition on the train. In his life before the train journey, he didn’t seem to write much either. Quite quickly, the entire novel turns its attention to Zaza’s pursuit of the wife of the man who would also become his translator. The big twist in the final few pages might have delivered a bigger blow if Zaza had been sympathetic enough to get invested in. In this regard, the plot and Zaza’s narration of events failed to deliver anything above the infantile. 

Each chapter has a section in italics narrated by a different person on the journey, yet these secondary narrators often share Zaza’s voice and cynical outlook in life. A passage in the voice of an older French female author who writes to her sister about her ongoing affair with a young Belorussian writer is probably the novel’s biggest literary failure. The letter is lost to the fact that it is presented without any previous character development and carries no distinguishable style or voice despite being penned by a woman of letters. She’s just Zaza with female body parts.

As this novel involves the author writing in the voice of a character who is also a writer, it can be hard to resist attributing Zaza’s attitudes and opinions to the author himself. The novel takes a cynical view of the modern literary landscape with its childish gimmicks, jealousies, and political bandwagons. A lot of commentary centres around everyone’s envy of one Bulgarian author who had a story published in the New Yorker, with frantic speculation and clinical dissection of the tactics he employed for him to be palatable to such an audience. 

The novel feels like an attempt at a joke about a writer capitalising on the momentary western interest in the plight of the Georgian people during the aftermath of the Russian invasion. It reads quite meta because that is precisely what the author did in writing this novel also. The formula of including stereotypes from all European nations on a pan-European journey against the political backdrop of 2008’s Russian invasion seems designed more for western consumption than for local Georgian consumption. As true as some of the commentary is about the state of modern literary institutions and the cut-throat figures climbing over one another to get published, The Literature Express fails to deliver much substance past its commentary.

Throughout the novel Zaza invokes ‘Georgian’ without ever demonstrating what that means. ‘Georgian’ is construed as negative, insular, and conservative. Zaza laments that the Georgian language fails to capture the ecstasy of erotic life, having only the banal ‘entering’ or vulgarities to describe sexual intercourse. However, there is one alleged sex scene in the novel and the author doesn’t extend the range of the Georgian literary imagination during this act. Perhaps the vocabulary would grow richer if writers wrote better. 

The author’s motivations in this novel remain debatable. He made Zaza a lazy, vapid, neurotic, self-obsessed, dull, horny nepo baby. He had him cry that there are no readers in Georgia yet he takes us on no literary journey within himself. Zaza laments illiterate writers and poets yet doesn’t demonstrate a desire to read either. Zaza doesn’t talk about any writers he admires or idolises. The author portrays modern writers as largely hostile, self-centred, jealous egoists, Zaza included. He devoted the majority of the plot to the pursuit of a vapid woman. Towards the end of the story, Zaza says “I’m a third-rate character and novels are never written about the likes of me” – was that the exercise? Either all these choices were intentional, and if so, why? Otherwise they might be a mirror of the author, a demonstration of the full range of his abilities.

The scenes from the novel evoked the question: why would anyone want to spend time reading if these are the writers of our time? It’s easy to argue that the author’s motivations might have been to express: there are no longer readers precisely because of the career-motivated characters like the protagonist. However, it’s also hard not to view this very novel as career motivated. Even if that was the author’s intent, there are still more enjoyable ways to do it.

This novel is the literary equivalent of Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten.

Restoration dialogue with a Hibernian twist

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Actress by Anne Enright

At one point in Taylor Smith’s Miss Americana, there’s a montage of scenes from her previous album tours. Each tour is a world apart from the previous. The entire performance is rechoreographed. All costumes, sets and dancers are reimagined. Swift tells us that female artists must reinvent themselves constantly to remain relevant, to remain palatable. At the time of filming Miss Americana, Swift was 29 and fully aware of her impending expiration date. She knows she’s on borrowed time. Regardless of the work it took to reach such heights, most female artists either fade or crash out of view after a certain age. A lucky few move into production roles. Female writers might be spared to some extent, but as Anne Enright has documented, very few female writers break through in the first place.

Taylor Swift is one of a long line of global stars. Her tribulations play out in real time on a billion small screens around the world. The global star phenomenon is relatively recent. In her latest novel, Anne Enright explores the life one of the first generation of global stars, Katherine O’Dell, who came of age in the post-war era and was an Irish theatre giant of her time. She performed on the West End, Broadway, and in Hollywood films. The story begins with O’Dell long dead, her later years mired in controversy. When Holly Devane, a postgraduate student arrives at the home of O’Dell’s only daugher Norah, she amuses and annoys Norah in her attempt to label Katherine O’Dell’s “sexual style”. This confrontation compels Norah to tell her mother’s story.

Enright’s Katherine O’Dell reads like a metaphor for the modern Irish state. We begin with the revelation that O’Dell was born in London to English parents – a fact that managed to remain out of the public domain. O’Dell’s father was the son of a British solider in Fermoy. Her father’s Catholicism functioned as the main cultural connection to Ireland. O’Dell came of age in the post-war period in the years in and around the declaration of the Irish Republic. She concocted her own Irish identity as a teenager on tour around Ireland with her actor parents on the rural theatre circuit. In a stage review of a Broadway show, a critic referred to her as O’Dell rather than her mother’s surname Odell. “Odell” went through a similar process of transliteration – an Anglophone’s impression of an Irish name – that all Gaelic surnames suffered at the hands of British colonists. As her star rose, she played an Irish woman so well she passed as Irish. No one ever questioned her Irishness. She became the global idea of Ireland, starring in butter ads and singing at Irish emigrant events. Later in life, after the major incident that led to her demise, a Garda from Gweedore reported that she spoke to him in a gibberish she claimed was Irish. Her gibberish, the Garda said, was a fairly good impression of the Irish language.

Some people are born stars. O’Dell had early opportunities to emerge as she stepped in to replace actors on her parents’ tour. The other players recognised her for what she was. She arrived in the acting world fully formed. She understood how to work the camera better than the directors. When she stepped out on stage, everything fell into place. Despite her rare gift, like every woman, she too had an expiry date. She left America for Ireland with a small, “privately” conceived child that does not appear to be the product of her stage-managed marriage to a gay co-star.

Enright’s novel moves recursively through key events and characters as Norah tries to make meaning of her mother’s life. In telling the story of Katherine O’Dell, Norah tells her own story. Norah cycles through a series of concerns, her unknowable paternity, her mother’s mysterious sexual life, the men that gathered around her in support and in judgement, and the bizarre event that led to her mother’s incarceration.

Taylor Swift knows she’s on borrowed time because of the Katherine O’Dells who went before her, their lives carefully studied and deconstructed. No solution has been found or proposed for the fact that our culture has an appetite only for young females. Half the Internet’s energy consumption goes into serving up images of young females, with an ever sliding scale of how young. We’ve long been sold the idea that the global market functions as some objective measure of value. Blame for something so abstract isn’t easily assigned. The market wants what it wants, we are told, as if we have no hand in the fine tuning and marketing of wholesale desire.

O’Dell makes failed trips back and forth across the Anglo-American world. She goes on smaller touring circuits. She is stubborn and ego-centric. At the same time as she finds herself written off as expired goods, male figures install themselves in the arts and literary world without having to work to maintain their position. These men emit no creative light of their own. They never deem themselves too old or undeserving of any pleasure or opportunity. They build their own empires off networks of artists. They manoeuvre themselves into positions where O’Dell has to seek their permission to work. They sit behind the camera and whisper about her and dismiss her. They laugh at her attempts to reinvent herself. She succumbs to heavy drinking and a cocktail of prescription medication.

Norah keeps pushing and uncovers a source of darkness in O’Dell’s past. In true Irish fashion, blame remains nonassignable. Even during Katherine O’Dell’s trial, responsibility for her own actions is diminished. Injustice seems societal and unspecific. Enright writes injustice into the very air we breathe.

Every now and again, Norah speaks directly to a “you” – her husband. Their union seems like the centripetal force tethering Norah to a life of stability compared to her mother’s. The “you” of this novel had encouraged Norah to write about her mother. The “you” of this story gave her permission. This reminds me of ancient Greek novels I studied such as the Aethiopica, where the story is female driven, but all successful female characters had a network of supportive men guiding them at all times. Women like O’Dell, who lived without male blessing, had negative outcomes.

O’Dell and Norah’s story unfolds to reveal not only their own story but a cultural history of Dublin. Each scene, sentence and phrase builds an impression of modern Ireland with all its porter bellies and rebel tunes. Enright’s writing style comes close to achieving what Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk does in his novels: a gentle unfurling of the soul of a nation disguised as a book.

Is that all there is?

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Diving For Pearls by Jamie O’Connell

The plot of Diving for Pearls centres around the death of Hiyam, a young Emirati woman. The novel flows through the voices of several characters. Through them, we discover her fate. For the most part, Diving for Pearls concerns itself with the actions and choices of one Irish family. The heart of the novel rests within the shifts of consciousness in Trevor, the troubled younger brother of Siobhán. Siobhán summons Trevor to Dubai where she has been living with her husband and children since the 2008 economic collapse. Like the dead Emirati woman, Trevor too ended up in open water as a result of a misspent evening. Siobhán thinks she can save Trevor without realising that she’s more lost than him.

Dubai feels like something out of a Mark Fisher book. It manifests as an expression of pure capitalist realism. Within its city limits, the global caste system is on full display. Public space is so inhospitable that if you attempt to spend time outdoors, you risk being seared to death by the sun. Refuge of any sort can be found only within the private shopping malls and hotels.

While O’Connell writes complex Irish characters, the foreign characters lack a certain dimensionality. On this point, I give O’Connell the benefit of the doubt. Diving For Pearls seems less interested in rendering characters’ rich inner worlds than in demonstrating that for every northern indulgence some southern family pays the price. This book has strong parallels with Jordan Peele’s film Us, where the Wilson family confronts the horror of their doppleganger family. The Wilson’s material gains result in torment and hardship for their counterparts who exist in a parallel underworld. O’Connell’s characters of non-white descent suffer endlessly and needlessly so that the white characters’ good fortune continues.

Within this novel, those with money are godless while the impoverished are pious. The worship of both capital and god relies on higher powers. These higher powers remain abstracted and unaccountable but widely believed. In the end, everyone relies on little more than hope. As Siobhán’s good fortunes flip from one moment to the next, in what is a comical scene, she tries to remember how to pray. In Diving for Pearls, Christianity provides a quiet sense of community. The Christians of diverse nationalities gather together to worship but also to commune with one another. The consumers seek individuals with whom they can binge in tandem. Both have a price.

O’Connell’s writing becomes urgent and compelling when he writes about faith. This seems a feature of the latest generation of Irish artists. While their fluency in Christian doctrine probably came through involuntary indoctrination, its immutable presence shapes their art. O’Connell’s writing expresses a final exhalation of Irish Christianity.

The Siobhán of this novel embodies the archetypal sleepwalking consumer of capital. She names her children Rocco and Milo after the new global deities. When Trevor enquires about the palpable inequality evident in Dubai, she’s quick to rationalise this as a law of nature. Someone has to slave! A certain comedy arises when Siobhán passes comment about Gete, her Ethiopian housemaid whose prospects of making a living in her homeland were robbed by foreign interests and whose entire fate rests in Siobhán’s hands. Siobhán thinks Gete fails to understand what is important in life, aka designer goods. Gete, knowing better than to ever comment, seems pregnant with opinion.

When Siobhán drags her family out to witness an actor scale the Burj Khalifa, the supreme moment of bearing witness fails to offset the discomfort of the voyage. Worship stripped of its religiosity splits Siobhán open for a moment. She realises that her entire life has been built on a lie; she chose luxury over ever knowing true desire. Her life’s milestones are garnished with disappointment. Nothing in her life has lived up to the hype. After this brief confessional moment, she returns to normal. Despite experiencing a great change in fortune, she doesn’t have the wherewithal to become conscious of the source of her malaise. Siobhán, as an embodiment of the general Irish population, and some might argue the entire global north, demonstrates comedic acts of cognitive dissonance.

Dublin and Dubai fail to differ enough to draw a strong contrast. Moving thousands of miles from one to the other offers distance rather than difference. For Trevor, Dubai might lead to a life post-Lucy Quirke. For Aasim, Dublin allows him the liberty of sharing a bed with a man without fear but also without love. Outside of that, both men know nothing but excess. Trevor tries to steel himself through building a thick muscular exoskeleton. Aasim flashes money to court friendships.

The one question I have is whether O’Connell could have written Diving For Pearls without Trevor. While O’Connell animates Trevor’s awakening with great skill, Trevor reads like a metaphor for the Labour Party or the American Democratic party. Although his lifestyle leads to the death and destruction of the global south, he retains the capacity to display some awareness and remorse. He understands the ills of the world enough for the rest of us to buy into him as a form of hope. Ultimately, he might change course but the change isn’t radical. A Diving For Pearls without a Trevor to add empathy would have been more realistic but less palatable.

Siobhán’s husband Martin remains voiceless throughout the novel. Everything that happens, happens because of his sense of entitlement. His shady dealings both stand up and tear down the lives of Siobhán and the boys. Martin lies beyond reach. He is both guilty and conscious of his actions. He may not mean to murder but he still robbed Hiyam of her life. Capitalism doesn’t mean to tear the planet to ribbons. The destruction of life and the environment is an unfortunate byproduct. Following the same natural order that necessitates modern slavery, Martin will never see the inside of a jail cell. His steady cash flow tethers him positively to his offspring even after all he has done. Even after her confrontations with reality, Siobhán continues to accept his money. The entire planet will plunge into flames and every one of us will die before Martin’s air conditioned apartment will experience mild brownouts. Martin represents everything that happens in the shadows. Deep down, we all know that the deals that Martin makes keep the known world spinning on its axis. Deep down, we’re all varying shades of Siobhán. In a metaphorical sense, we all choose Martin. If ‘he’ were to stop, some of the global north’s luxury would cease to exist. Martin goes unprosecuted because to prosecute Martin would mean confronting our own culpability.

Nothing is real. Nothing is certain or eternal. As quick as all this has been created, like Sodom and Gommorah, it can come undone. As much as Emirati wealth can couch them in luxury, the bodies still pile up. Sometimes they find their own family members among the casualties. As the fire grows nearer, the smoke will engulf us all.

What a masterful first novel from Jamie O’Connell.

The last failure of 2021

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On not finishing Spill Simmer Falter Wither

My friend Joanne lent me a stack of books in 2019. The stack remains on my shelf since the last two years have robbed me of opportunities to return them to her. This stack introduced me to Rebecca Solnit, who I then binge read for the rest of 2019. The stack also contained a few from Tramp Press, a few book-shaped literary journals, as well as Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. I read the back of Conversations with Friends and deemed myself unqualified either to read or weigh in on Rooney. I have read Normal People. I’ve also had several “conversations with friends” about Normal People. I think that adequate Internet ink has been spilled on Sally Rooney. As many have said before me: what she does obviously appeals. I wish her well.

Apart from Conversations with Friends, one other book remains unread from Joanne’s stack: Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Father Wither.

When I say unread I mean abandoned. I spent a few days labouring through the first quarter of this book about a man in East Cork who rescues a dog. I can’t quite put my finger on what caused me to abandon this book.

People have different philosophies about their bookshelves. I remember an American friend whose house heaved under the weight of books that she had bought but hadn’t read. I’m the opposite. I can count on one hand the books that I failed to at least trudge through. Unread books in my environment distress me. Looking at Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither unread on my shelves stung me. I set aside everything to read it this winter break.

And I sit here having decided to abandon the book once again.

I thought that the last two years would have helped me appreciate and identify with the main character of Spill Simmer Falter Wither, a man who spends most of his life in isolation. A man who never learned the fine details of his origin story. A man who knows he shares nothing in common with those he sees passing by his window, those who he’s forced to make small talk with every now and again. A man who spent a long time learning the names of the most common flowers in his immediate environment for a lack of anything better to do. A man who spends as much time at home as we all have been forced to during this pandemic. A man who, unlike the rest of us, doesn’t complain.

The novel begins when he rescues a stray dog that carries a lot of emotional baggage. The dog is quick to bite. His new owner is slow to restrain or place a muzzle on him in public space. This leads to inevitable mauling of other dogs. Then the dog warden appears to seize the animal. Fleeing from the warden, the monotony of the everyday is replaced with the monotony of traveling through one grimy Irish village after the other.

I’m sure someone has called the novel life affirming and used several lofty adjectives to describe the bond between man and dog. As the novel progresses, the man falls asleep and in his dreams he enters the psyche of the dog. The man projects everything he has onto this dog. He gives everything he has to give.

I thought that reading this novel in 2019 was the problem. My own life moved at a much more rapid pace. I bounced from one event to the next. I worked my way through pithy, beautiful novels. I returned to this novel with the idea that the pandemic might have put manners on me. Objectively, I cannot fault the construction of this book, the language of this book, the rendering of the character, the empathy Baum has shown him. I recognise the undercurrent of everyday Ireland in these pages. The one thing I’m bereft of is pleasure.

What the novel does best of all is demonstrate that rural Ireland is devoid of public space. The narrator hunts for small gateways where he can neatly tuck his car in before sleeping each evening. Driving through the city centres during the lockdowns of the last two years and seeing the youth of Ireland sitting together on cold concrete, this lack of public space never felt so evident. This is a topic for another day.

Depending on what 2022 has in store for us, I might find myself returning to this book with interest. Stranger things have happened.

You can’t live on love, on love alone

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Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski

In this gentle novel, our narrator Ludwik recalls the summer he met Janusz. The heat of their love was almost strong enough to eclipse the complications of their lives during the final years of Polish communism. The men share a few oneiric days on a lakeside somewhere in eastern Poland. Janusz imagines ghosting the wealthy young woman who has been his meal ticket; Ludwik dreams about freedom. When they return to Warsaw to begin their lives post-graduation, things ultimately fall apart.

While I read Swimming In The Dark, Losing at the Starting Line – Wang Xiuying on Chinese education kept coming to mind, especially the following passage:

The problem as Xi sees it is that the universities produced too many liberals and humanists. Egypt is the worst case scenario: an inflated higher education system with too many humanities graduates leading to endless protests and revolutions. Plenty of talkers, no doers. In April, a report by the People’s Bank of China stated that East Asian countries were falling into the ‘middle-income trap’ because of the preponderance of liberal arts students[…] My humanist friends take solace in the fact that we are not at war: the Japanese Kamikaze Death Squad sent ‘useless’ arts students on suicide missions in the Second World War.

If we pare back this novel’s lakeside moments where love comes close to conquering all and the political backdrop of communism’s terminal years, a disgruntled Arts graduate lies at the heart of the story. The events in Swimming In The Dark take place shortly after the main character, Ludwik, graduates with a Humanities degree, without any real plan and no desire to teach. The existential malaise of an Arts graduate without a strong vocational inclination is not unique to communist societies: having grown up on the opposite end of Europe, in a heavily capitalist society two decades after Ludwig, I faced similar prospects.

On a sentence, paragraph, and scene level, I enjoyed this book. Jedrowski is a skilled writer. However well Jedrowski renders aspects of Polish life and culture, I felt a strong sense that in reading this book, I was eating from the garbage can of ideology.

From early in the story, out on the oneiric lakeside, Ludwik speaks of freedom. The freedom that Ludwik alludes to escaped me as a reader. While the book trots out the scenes of people queuing all day for basic amenities that we all know to associate with the collapse of communism, when Ludwik speaks of freedom, he seems to be speaking about something else. He rejects the idea of becoming a teacher because of the low pay and need to swallow the Party line, but teaching is notoriously underpaid and undervalued in capitalist societies too. He wants to live out and proud as a gay man in the 1980s and seems to allude to communism as the obstacle. In the USA, outside of a few enclaves in a few of the larger cities, homosexuality was just as frowned upon. In many Western liberal democracies, AIDS affected large percentages of the gay communities and their governments left them to die during these years. In Ireland, homosexuality remained illegal up until 1993. The desire of an Arts graduate without any familial connections to live a middle-class and openly queer life in his country’s capital is not unique, easily solved, and certainly not one I would associate with communism. If this book were set in modern day Poland, in which the totalitarianism of communist rule has now been replaced with the totalitarianism of free-market capitalism, a conservative government and the Catholic church, I would find the struggles of Ludwik more real. When Poland joined the European Union, it did so on the promise of capitalist wealth and liberal values, which do not look like they’ve been delivered in equal measures.

We see key characters try to install themselves in the working world. Our narrator makes half-hearted attempts to enroll in a postgraduate programme he has no real interest in. His friend Karolina ends up in some menial position. Ludwik’s lover Janusz is the most successful, getting a job in the office of press control and having no qualms about it. Those who are from wealthier families have better prospects. I have no doubt that this is a relatively accurate portrayal of postgraduate life in communist Poland, but is this different under any other regime? In the US, where Ludwik eventually flees to, would a working class southern youth like Janusz ever manage to enter into a large university in the country’s capital?

The book begins and ends in Ludwik’s self-imposed exile in Chicago, where people ask how are you but don’t care about the answer and the bread is suspiciously soft. Ludwik lives alone, works in an office, and watches Poland collapse from afar. If the character of Ludwik would still live today, he would still be watching Poland fall apart, but without the salacious US media coverage. In the closing pages of the book, we get the sense that life in the US fails to deliver the freedom Ludwik sought. Delusion is the closest thing to freedom Americans can find.

As well as changes in its physical location, Poland has experienced unprecedented shifts in its demographic and political ideology in the last century. Its problems grow more acute with every passing day. While I enjoyed this novel’s tour of Warsaw and quiet acknowledgements of those hidden queers who carried the cultural torch throughout turbulent times, pointing the finger towards communism as the source of all ills strikes a bum note. 32 years after the fall of communism, Poland is not the bastion of LGBT rights you’d imagine.

The question that lingers within me in the days after I finished this book is: if this were a queer love story with a positive framing of the social fabric they enjoyed under communism, could it have been published? Was it so necessary to denounce a failed system for another failed system to feel good about itself?

Manworshipping 101: Ferrante’s ‘difficult second album’

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In The Lying Life of Adults, a tween named Giovanna overhears her father commenting that she’s becoming like his sister Vittoria. This alone causes her teenage mind to gallop in all directions, turning in on itself, whipping up a flurry of binaries that she uses to parse the world around her. Giovanna’s catastrophising of her father’s words sets off what seems like the main course of the book and leads us to Aunt Vittoria.

When Giovanna meets Vittoria, she first learns about the presence of a bracelet, a woman’s bracelet Vittoria allegedly gifted to Giovanna as a child. Giovanna’s parents deny any knowledge of such a gift. Soon, we learn that the bracelet resided all this time on the wrist of Constanza, the wife of Giovanna’s father’s best friend, with whom he had been conducting an affair for over a decade. When the affair comes to light, the bracelet then moves onto the wrist of Giovanna, as she defines and redefines herself in the aftermath of her father moving in with Constanza and her mother becoming his widow despite the fact that her ex is alive and healthy in another household. Tension over the bracelet leads Giovanna to her first odorous sexual contact with a man, and eventually moves from her wrist to that of the daughter of aunt Vittoria’s lover, Giuliana, who reveals that the bracelet had been stolen by her father Enzo from the wrist of his dying mother in law, and gifted to aunt Vittoria’s healthy mother in order to charm her and make a good impression. The bracelet comes back to Giovanna when she travels to Milan under the pretence of retrieving it for Giuliana, all the while burning with desire to sleep with Giuliana’s fiance, Roberto, before changing her mind. Ultimately, she abandons the bracelet in the final stages of the novel, left beside the bed where she lost her virginity. I hope someone sanitised the bracelet on occasion.

Aunt Vittoria and her adopted family spark all the action in the story. Their dialect breathes life into the stagnant imaginations of the middle class teenage girls. The precarity of their lives, their vulnerability, overt sexuality, poverty and piety excite Giovanna and her friends. Through the characters she meets in Vomero, down there where her father escaped from, Giovanna finds the opportunity to sing along with the common people, to rebel against her parents, before a careful regression to the mean, to the sum of her parents’ parts.

The book cast me under its spell quite fast as I trotted through its pages, convinced that the teenage character would serve as a conduit of truths and revelations about the adults of the story. Then with the introduction of Giovanna’s fascination for Roberto, it seemed like Ferrante suddenly struck a bum note. The careful setup veered off course. Every character introduced before this fades out. Almost everything that led to this moment gave way and descended into half baked adolescent trivialities more suited to a volume of Twilight.

Misguidedly, I foresaw a story that would unfold through a teenage lens about the adults. I thought that through its oversimplified use of binaries, the young narrator would deconstruct the notions of the father figure, of the illusion of order and civility in middle class lives, and go on to expose the futility of trying to transcend human nature. To some extent the book achieves this. Giovanna’s father, despite pulling himself out of the margins and into a respectable middle class existence, finds himself conducting a long affair, the same behaviour he condemned his sister for. He breaks up his family, ultimately destabillising his daughter. His intellectual life seems to have been his defining characteristic as well as his disavowal of Catholicism, yet he seems bored among his peers and desperate to ingratiate himself with the young Catholic intellectual Roberto. Rather than focusing in any meaningful way, these parts of the story simmer dully in the background while the narrator bleats about Roberto, someone she saw give a talk once.

Vittoria seemed poised to play a larger role. She’s the firestarter, yet Ferrante allows her to slip quickly into obscurity. She remains a half-drawn character whose potential for apocalypse and revelation never quite made the mark.

The Lying Life of Adults chronicles the teenage experience of total plasticity. We know next to nothing about Giovanna other than who she becomes from one moment to the next as she accepts and rejects new idols. The drama opens with her feeling ugly and rejected by her father. This causes her to seek out Vittoria and ultimately come under the influence of young men out to sexually exploit her. She teeters close to the edge of satisfying them on their own terms. Then, she falls under the influence of Roberto the fiancee of Giuliana, who calls her beautiful, and changes once again to become someone interesting to him. Towards the end of the book she meets Ida, the younger sister of Angela, with the two of whom she had spent her childhood, until her father and their mother were revealed as lovers, which fractured their friendship for a time. The book ends with her mirroring the actions of Ida, another random turn of events. If Ferrante intended to demonstrate the fickle nature of young women, the fact that all men are on the take, and the only real sensuality can be found in moments of experimentation among women, then she succeeded.

Ultimately, everyone who reads this book is looking for a repeat of The Neopolitan Quartet. Every review is a comparison of this new work and The Neopolitan Quartet. Every review I’ve read of The Lying Life of Adults is either an opinion piece on The Neopolitan Quartet or a discussion of Ferrante’s anonymity. It’s hard to judge The Lying Life of Adults with a clear head.

In Ferrante’s collection of essays and letters, Frantumaglia, which is one of the best books I’ve read in years, she mentions that she doesn’t publish unless she’s personally interested in the project. She has many book-length manuscripts stuffed in drawers that failed to meet her expectations. Either she tried too hard and it doesn’t feel natural, or she simply couldn’t make it work. The fact that The Lying Life of Adults is published means she saw something in it that she deemed worthy to release to the world. I wish I saw it too.

Went out for the weekend, it lasted forever

Posted on by minorhistory

Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel Mayflies describes a friendship between two men, Jimmy and Tully, who met on their council estate in 1980s Ayrshire and remained close until Tully’s death from stomach cancer in his early fifties. The book unfolds in two distinct parts, one in 1986 as young men, the other in 2017 as Tully’s days became numbered. Despite being a long-term subscriber of the London Review of Books, and having read a lot of his non fiction, this was my first time reading O’Hagan’s fiction. However, an interview with O’Hagan confirmed my suspicions about the book: Mayflies is a non fiction novel. O’Hagan has changed the names but the setting and characters all correspond with real people. The incidents described, for the most part, happened as described. The book is dedicated to his lost friend and his wife. Undoubtedly, anything based on reality absorbs a certain amount of fiction in the very act of retelling, but this novel reads more like someone trying to process trauma than fiction.

O”Hagan sets the first half of Mayflies in his home place of 1980’s Ayrshire, in a working class community on the edge of a lost future. Thatcher is name-checked in the first half as is Brexit in the second, but the story is personal, and not in the sense of the personal as political. In the past, O’Hagan has written well about the impact of Thatcherism in Britain. However, in Mayflies, the characters don’t seem shaped in any distinctive sense by the political landscape. Teenagers who are attracted to alternative rock embrace its counter culture politics. Teenagers in 1960s America protested the Vietnam war in much the same way some of my classmates protested the Iraq war around the turn of the century. Although the narrator mentions that Tully delivered food parcels to the homes of mining families, everything about the politics of the novel feels shallow. Any appearance of race or politics demonstrate Tully’s kindness and maturity, his fixed nature that reacted to the circumstances but were not shaped by them. Later in the novel, the narrator has dinner with a vicar who has just returned from the opening of a food bank. While Thatcherist politics have a direct correlation with the need for food banks, this is nothing but background noise, small talk that is inconsequential to the story. The impact the characters’ parents had on the men they become runs deeper and is easier to trace than the national politics.

The characters bond because of chance and circumstance, having been born close to one another, with similar interests and an intelligence that never quite allows them to fit in. In the second half, both characters have made it out – the protagonist as a successful writer and Tully as an English teacher. They stand on the other side of the social divide, with means and options their parents never had. Although this is factual, as this story barely disguises its basis in reality, one could argue that it serves to validate Thatcher. Both characters picked themselves up by their bootstraps and enjoyed the social mobility capitalist society promises to provide.

This “First Big Weekend” trope of the first half of the book has been done to death. Once upon a time, a group of sound lads went out and had a mad one. The End. Without the context of the second half, it reads as another all-male coming of age story described by a man who is feeling past his prime. Every man who has had the privilege of seeing middle age has a similar story to tell. The fact that the preface of the book contains a quote from Yeats – the king of all middle-aged men. – did not bode well. O’Hagan’s prose, while accessible, lacks the hypnotic effect of his Assange book or any of his London Review of Books pieces. O’Hagan becomes Yeats in this novel, and whatever your opinion of Yeats, he was first and foremost zero craic. At most, Mayflies is an essay that fleshes out the Yeats quote.

While O’Hagan wrote the book to pay tribute to his dead friend and their shared time together, what’s most striking is that nothing in their adult lives seems to matter as much as the music they encounter as teens. Tully spends most of his adult life dedicated to music and making music, yet when they travel to Switzerland so that he can end his life on his own terms, he puts on a Joy Division t-shirt. Even Tully’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, remembers nothing of herself or her family but sings the hits from her own era. If we treat Mayflies more like an allegory, the existential issue seems to be less about death and surviving one’s loved ones and more about the fact that regardless of the decades we continue to live through, our internal world remains tethered to the period of our lives when we were on the edge of becoming someone, our initial emergence, and never moves beyond this. Whether anyone does in fact become whoever they wanted to be seems to matter little, in Mayflies at least. O’Hagan writes with more heat about the gig in Manchester than his own outstanding literary achievements or the life he built for himself in London.

I realise that I’m glazing over the fact that the novel is the portrait of a very best friend who was taken quickly and before his time. To anyone normal, this should be and probably is the primary horror of the novel. However, the idea that one can live a long life, which seems to be the aim, and everything pale in insignificance to the first friends, lovers, and music seems like the real horror.

Lesbians in the Fairyfort: Strange Flowers

Posted on by minorhistory

In Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Strange Flowers, a twenty year old Moll Gladney, the only daughter of impoverished parents living at the mercy of Castle Catholics in North Tipperary, goes missing. Five years later, she returns with a black British husband and their white baby. You read on for another hundred pages until you learn that Moll went missing because she’d gotten an intercaste kiss off the Castle Catholic wife, Ellen Jackman. C’est ci.

Most people I know who read, are reading Donal Ryan. RTE declares that with Strange Flowers, “Ryan reaffirms his place amongst Ireland’s greatest wordsmiths”. The Irish Independent describes it as “an expansive and thought provoking parable”. In an interview with The Irish Times, Ryan mentions that he “casts no shade”, aka, makes no negative comments in public about other writers, and taking its cue from him, The Irish Times refrains from evaluating his latest work. Friends have said to me that in Ireland – where so much depends on your network, who your parents are, and whether or not you are alumni of one or two universities – no one writes negative reviews. No published writer gets a roasting in a broadsheet or by the national broadcaster. A former colleague of mine, someone’s son and a Trinity graduate, confessed to me that he did not have the courage to write a negative review even of mainstream American bands for a local paper. Across the Irish Sea, after lavishing Strange Flowers with praise, The Guardian goes as far as to admit “Strange Flowers may be the weakest of Ryan’s novels, but it is still a gorgeously wrought book”.

The first Donal Ryan novel I attempted to read was From a Low and Quiet Sea. I opened the book at the boarding gate in Vienna Airport and drank from its pages until they called my flight. On a sentence level, Ryan demonstrates pure mastery. He is the foremost contemporary writer of the Hiberno-English sentence. His words flow in a natural North Munster vernacular. The levity of his writing zeros out the length of his sentences as he carries you through page after page at great speeds. In Vienna, by the time they called my flight, I had almost made it to the end. However, once I boarded the flight, I forgot all about it and never opened the book again. Despite not having made it through From a Low and Quiet Sea, I continued to read Ryan’s books because everyone who reads seems to be reading Ryan. And here I am, bewildered and reluctant to express what I think about this book because in Ireland no one takes such risks, do they?

Was it through this same lack of courage that Ryan arrived at the careful plot of Strange Flowers? His sentences meander through themes of interracial relationships and lesbianism but he seals them within the safety of a 1970s time capsule. The main characters, who subsist on the good graces of their wealthy landlord, never question their lot in life. When their mind wanders, it waxes lyrical about the beauty of the North Tipperary countryside, never to fantasies of seizing the means of production. Ryan grazes on themes of inequality, class, and race but never bites.

Because of the black characters, the publishers went as far as to hire a sensitivity reader who flagged and removed some issues from the manuscript. Despite this extreme caution, if Strange Flowers had been the work of a white US or British male writer, its flatness would have courted controversy. The portrayal of the black experience in Strange Flowers reads like a caricature of a Zadie Smith novel crossed with the British soap Eastenders. While Ryan does orbit the issue of black fragility, his continued reticence leaves the text both ignorant and ineffective. The black characters seem too hot to handle in any meaningful or insightful way to the extent that if there had been no blackness in this novel at all, would anything have changed?

In lieu of the roast of Strange Flowers I feel bubbling within me, I offer the Internet a few key insights into Irish life as gleaned from its pages:

  • The Gardai remain invisible in cases of sexual harassment, attempted murder, or rape. They materialise only if a black man comes to town, if a teenager has a tiny quantity of hash, or if the person who killed the one black man in town needs consoling.
  • Sexual intercourse occurs indoors only in London. In Ireland, sensuality remains restricted to the riverbanks and the Fairyforts.
  • The Castle Catholics, the 1% whose expansive inherited wealth means they determine the fate of those around them, are the only people who dwell on and lament the loss of even vaster fortunes they once held.
  • A shift between two Irish women lasts a lifetime.


Sunny on the inside: David Hockney A Life

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David Hockney A Life arrived on a rainy November afternoon. Its bright yellow cover with pink and blue circles contrasted everything about the dreary season in which it landed. Some book covers exude a strength, a confidence that announces the book before a single page is turned. More often than not, a front is nothing but, well, a front. However, the energy in Cusset’s portrait of Hockney, in his white suit and bleached hair, matches the strength and simplicity of the cover. Although this work is based on the life of David Hockney, Cusset assures us that this is a novelistic account where she has unified and threaded his life story with artistic license.

David Hockney’s talents unshackle him from his happy yet humble Bradford origins. As a young artist with a strong internal compass, he decides to paint only what matters to him. His artistic life follows a linear trajectory that doesn’t bow to the tastes of the modern art theorists or critics, and leads him to fame and fortune, a fairy-tale life to anyone on the outside looking in. If this was a work of pure fiction, would anyone believe that the life of a young, working-class artist from northern England could have progressed with such ease?

Hockney’s life marches along in a steady progression. Cusset doesn’t loop back; no elements of his childhood or adolescence return to haunt him as an adult. A close friend, Ann, describes Hockney as an island, a self-winding clock. David, however, doesn’t consider himself a self-winding clock; he needs to be surrounded by friends, who like many in the gay community, become his family. The character of Hockney as portrayed by Cusset, through his steady stream of successes, lovers, old and new friends, his migrations to and from California, his switching through different mediums and perspectives, suggests that he’s probably as close as a human can come to being a self-winding clock.

Although he laughs off critics and pins their work to his wall in defiance, their words sink to his bedrock. On weak moments, their opinions threaten to become gospel. Luckily, this never seems to last long. Nights spent lying awake in this story are few and far between. With the constant houseguests and dinner parties, drink and drugs, a traditional night’s sleep is not something that appears as a feature of the book until much later in his life, after he has suffered his second stroke. Very little of this story lies in wait for anything.

Towards the end of the book, David’s beloved sister says that she thinks the space around us is God. There is a godliness in the space this small book allows for the preservation of Hockney’s dignity. Despite narrating some of the most harrowing experiences in Hockney’s life: the loss of all his close friends to AIDS or pancreatic cancer, the loss of his parents, and the loss of his hearing, at his lowest moments, Hockney’s story keeps ploughing ahead. With a change of scene, a change of tools, an embrace of technology, a return to his canvas, he continues to find the beauty in his surroundings, whether it’s a billboard in Los Angeles or a hawthorn bloom in Yorkshire. Despite the fact that there are intimate details in the book such as his loss of erectile function as he progresses into his seventies, or how much he suffered when his first and probably greatest love, Peter, breaks off their relationship, Cusset writes scenes as if she’s working with watercolours. She gives, what seems like equal treatment to all parts of his life.

Hockney lives a charmed life. Despite all the odds, he emerged out of nowhere Bradford to become a prominent figure in the global art world. Despite living through the AIDs epidemic, losing many around him, he remained unscathed. Although his health has plagued him at times, he has recovered. Despite his deafness and progressing age, he continues to see the world anew.

This swift, bright, active text, is a winter tonic. David Hockney A Life, written by Catherine Cusset, is the literary equivalent to a Hockney painting.

Milk Drunk: A Ghost in the Throat

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In a short space of time, Tramp Press established itself as a publisher of books that capture the modern Irish experience. Over the last few years, its publication of both fiction and non fiction, such as Solar Bones, Notes to Self, and Handiwork, has raised the bar so high that I’ll gamble on reading anything Tramp Press puts out regardless of subject. For me, reading, A Ghost In The Throat was one of these gambles. If A Ghost In The Throat had not been published by Tramp Press, I’m not sure I would have read it.

Without knowing the first thing about Doireann Ní Ghríofa, the subject of this book would have been enough to dissuade me from reading it. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose keening I was unfamiliar with, lived in a period of Irish history that I find unbearable to read about. I struggle to read accounts of both early Irish civilisation and Ireland under British rule. I have vivid memories of the despair I felt sitting in the library pouring over a battered copy of Maire and Liam de Paor’s Early Christian Ireland among other books that were prescribed reading in first year of university. I avoid reading books about early Ireland because it saddens me to read of a culture that didn’t survive. I avoid reading books about Ireland under British rule because I don’t enjoy reading the mechanics of how the culture didn’t survive. Ní Ghríofa’s work explores the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose husband Airt Uí Laoghaire was gunned down by British soldiers in 1773 in rural Cork. The historical timeline, setting, and backdrop are all laced with a politics that I avoid in my leisurely reading. However, Ní Ghríofa has managed to deliver a text so maternal that it shields the reader from the politics of the era. She has wrapped her words in a warmth that is uniquely feminine. At the beginning of the book, Ní Ghríofa asserts that this is a female text, and she does not exaggerate. This is a female text that is swimming with the deranged and milk-drunk optimism of mothers who continue their daily tasks regardless of the era and crises that erupt in the outer world.

Some people whether real, fictional, or historical, stay with us for a lifetime. Regardless of whether we knew them or ever met them, we encounter them and elevate them to an eternal pedestal. There’s a window of time in which this is more likely to happen. As children, with one foot still in the dreamworld, we’re too removed to form this kind of connection. As adults, we’re too busy or broken, too cynical or distracted. During those tender years between childhood and adulthood, in a haze of hormones, we run a high risk of imprinting upon someone and carrying them around in our heads for the rest of our lives. Ní Ghríofa encounters Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill at three stages of her life. As a child, her first reading of Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire fails to leave a dent. As a teenager, she identifies with the pain of lost love in the way only teenagers can. As an adult, forced to leave Cork city as the rental crisis made life there unsustainable for her and her young family, Ní Ghríofa drove through the unfamiliar countryside that was now her home and realised she was living close to where Ní Chonaill spent her married life. Somewhere between her third and fourth child, between the school runs and the household tasks, Ní Ghríofa found herself compelled to attempt a narrative of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. She found herself haunted by and haunting Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. In trying to shed light on the life of a female poet in 18th century Ireland, Ní Ghríofa sheds light on the life of a female poet in 21st century Ireland. In painting a portrait of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa paints a portrait of herself.

A Ghost in the Throat is a series of parallels, of cycles, of paying it forward in words, deeds, breast milk, and pony tails. While Ní Ghríofa searches for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, we travel with her between Muskerry and Derrynane, between her and Ní Chonaill’s own rebellions and lust.

The lives and deeds of Irish women are as poorly recorded and appreciated as any. Although Ní Ghríofa leaves no stone unturned in her pursuit of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, we only have of Ní Chonaill what Ní Chonaill willingly gave. Very little else remains of her: no artefacts or accounts of her life outside of her keening. While she searches for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa cherry-picks intimate moments from her life that reveal her own sexuality, sorrow, lust for life, and a maternal instinct that threatens to envelop everyone in its path. This account of her own life is probably the account she would have loved to read about Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Despite the fact that we now live in the year 2020, the revealing nature of A Ghost In The Throat is still a brave act. In a country with a small population, often with one or two degrees of separation between people, texts this intimate are few and far between.

If I hadn’t read this book, I would have missed out. Ní Ghríofa created a work so powerful that I can imagine some future youth, tender in age, imprinting onto Ní Ghríofa, elevating her to a pedestal, and in mining Ní Ghríofa’s life, discovering herself.