Tag: R.F. Kuang

It’s been a busy week and a half, marked by major events and changes at work, then a bad flu which left me too weak to read anything more challenging than classic crime. Of course I’ve fallen behind with all of my December reading and reviewing plans. So this will be a bumper edition of mini-reviews about the nine books I’ve read so far this month. I know, I know, I’ve been struggling to get out of bed, that’s my excuse!

Non-Fiction or Experimental Fiction by Translators was my very loose theme this month, and I have four books thus far falling into these categories:

Polly Atkin: Some of Us Just Fall – On Nature and Not Getting Better – Polly is a poet first and foremost, and this shows in her beautifully observed sketches of life in Cumbria, her walks, her wildwater swims (brrr!). This is a memoir of growing up with two genetic chronic conditions, of being misdiagnosed (or told there was nothing wrong with her) until her mid-thiries, but it is also a warning to not fetishise the nature cure, and a story of learning to live with chronic illness. A book I shall be returning to again and again – and of course, it came just at the right time for me, now I’ve been diagnosed with arthritis.

The narrative odds are too often stacked against disabled people. There are two options that seem to be available: triumphal recovery or inspirational death. There are too few stories of continuation. Too few stories of joy. Too few stories of the millions of ordinary ways a disabled life may fold and unfold, like any life.

Lindy West: The Witches Are Coming – I think this is a collection of essays by New York Times columnist Lindy West, published in 2019. Stuffed to the gills with contemporary 2016-2018 cultural references, it is starting to show its age. It is also full of that brittle, slightly shrieky humour that is very New York (no wonder the author called her memoir ‘Shrill’), which can be a bit hit-and-miss for my taste. I usually prefer my putdowns to be more subtle, but she makes some good points and is very funny on occasion:

This anecdote is often held up as evidence of Ted Bundy’s charisma – even the judge sentencing him to death was seduced by that smirk, that finger wave. But it is the most blatant, overwhelming evidence we have for the opposite. Men don’t need charisma to suceed. It doesn’t matter if men are likable, because men are people who do things, who don’t have have to ask first, whose potential has value even after it is squandered.

On the other hand, women. Is there such a thing as a likable woman? Can you think of one? […]

Someone will always pop up to say,’ You would be more effective if you were nicer.’ ‘You would have a more receptive audience if you adjusted your tone.’ ‘You catch more flies with honey.’ Well, I don’t want flies. The most likable woman in the world is crawling with fucking flies.

Louise Beech: Eighteen Seconds

This was a powerful story of growing up with a depressed, narcissistic mother, trying to make sense of a complicated childhood that luckily had a lot of sibling love to make up for the lack of parental love. The title of the book comes from what the author’s mother once told her: ‘I wish you could feel the way I do for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you’d know how awful it is.’

However, like many people who’ve experienced mental health problems themselves, I feel that is no excuse for some of the bad behaviour and neglect of the children that this mother showed. I also found the child’s almost endless ability to forgive and wish for a mother’s love very moving – although that does change at the end.

I’m still sad if I think of her being alone. If I think of her feeling unhappy… But finally, I absolutely, objectively know that my mother isn’t my responsibility, Her happiness is not my responsibility. Just because I feel sad for her, I don’t have to act on that. I don’t have to let it guide me back into past behaviours of tolerating, forgiving, overlooking, over and over and over.

Angelica Garnett: Deceived with Kindness

Of course I knew all about the loves and lives of the Bloomsbury Group, but this is the first time I hear of the effect it had on the second generation, on their children. Although the author admits that she would have written the book differently years later, and would no longer cast herself as the ‘eternal victim’, it was clearly a sort of therapeutic exercise for her, trying to make sense of a complicated tangle of relationships and feelings that were seldom discussed. I love her recollections of people like Julian Bell, her brother, or her aunt Virginia: she shows great insight into characters, but there is no denying that they could all have been more open with her.

Bloomsbury believed in and largely practised intellectual tolerance, but often failed to recognise the power of the emotions or the reasoning of the heart. Fascinating and vital, they hid their feelings behind an apparent detachment that I found at that time repressive and confusing.

Second theme of the month appeared almost by accident. I’ve been struck down by flu since Saturday and the only thing my mind could settle on was some light, vintage crime fiction for sheer entertainment and distraction from pain and coughing. So naturally the Vintage Crime Advent Calendar came to the rescue and I’ve read four of its offerings already, one per day. They did their job splendidly! Here they are in order of release:

Ivy Litvinov: His Master’s Voice (1930) – the author is a fascinating character in her own right, an English journalist and writer who married a Russian revolutionary and settled with him in Moscow in the 1920s. Her husband became a diplomat, she became a distinguished translator, and they somehow managed to survive a couple of Stalinist purges. Her detective novel set in 1920s milieu of ballet, shared housing and vagrant street children is full of the kind of detail you can’t see in anyone else’s writing about Russia at the time. The police of course seem a bit too nice and sanitised.

Zenith Brown (writing as David Frome): Two Against Scotland Yard (1931) – an American author who wrote a series of books set in England featuring the shy, almost featureless Mr Pinkerton as an amateur detective. This one about the highway robbery and murder of a prestigious jeweller on the Colnbrook Road just off the Windsor bypass was particularly attractive to me since I know the area well, but it was more of an Inspector Bull story than Pinkerton really.

Patricia Wentworth: The Traveller Returns (A Miss Silver Mystery) (1948) – that well-known trope when someone believed to be dead suddenly reappears. Could it be an imposter or is it really the person believed to be dead? With an added war-twist to it and with the ever-knitting, ever reliable Miss Silver in the background.

Edmund Crispin: Sudden Vengeance (aka Frequent Hearses) (1950) – an unusual Gervase Fen mystery, set in the film world, with which the author (the composer of the music to the Carry On films) was undoubtedly familiar. A tale of ambition, rivalry and revenge and very few pleasant characters.

The ninth book that I read I actually bought as a Christmas present for my younger son, although I’m not sure that he’ll enjoy it as much as I did: R.F. Kuang’s Babel. I’m not a fan of the endless dark academia trend, and in fact I was somewhat put off by the overhype around Yellowface (which had a good premise but ultimately descended into a bit of a mess), but I’m glad I read this one. How refreshing to see translators as heroes (or rebels or villains), when most of the time we barely make it out of our pyjamas and hot-water bottles to sit in front of our computer! It is so passionate about language, etymology and translation, that I’m surprised that it appealed to such a broad audience.

‘I think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks… the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once… The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’