Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals is a collection of short stories that examine women’s place in western society, the artificial limits placed on us because of our gender, and the impact of the type of toxic masculinity that draws heavily on a past where women had fewer rights. Science Fiction mingles with folklore, horror and pop culture to document the surreal and complex worlds of the characters.
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Henry and Astrid: a psychiatrist and a singer, drawn together at one of her gigs into an unequal relationship. Told in alternating chapters, Henry’s relayed in the first person, Astrid’s in the second, What You Could Have Won tells us about these two flawed individuals in a story that moves between New York City and a small Greek island via Paris. This is a knowing novel, sending out nods and winks, self-referential to author Rachel Genn’s interests in her other areas of work. It struck me as being less clever than it thought it was, though.
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Margaret Drabble’s 2004 novel The Red Queen is inspired by the memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong, a Korean Crown Princess in the second half of the 18th century. In it, Drabble has constructed a fiction in which the ghost of Lady Hyegyeong possesses the mind of a British academic, Dr Babs Halliwell, in order to correct some misconceptions about her life and who she was as a person.
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Read 22/08/2021-28/08/2021
Rating 5 stars
The Trick is to Keep Breathing is book eight on my summer reading challenge list, part of Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. It is the story of Joy, a Drama teacher whose life is unravelling. It combines narrative with text layout, font weight and insertion of illustrative elements to represent Joy’s unravelling. There’s a feel of concrete poetry to it, and the sort of textual play that Nicola Barker used in her novel H(A)PPY. There’s also a feel of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine to Joy’s story, superficially in the way Joy looks to women’s magazines to distract and instruct, and more seriously in the way her immediate family has treated her, and the damage not having a safety net can do to a person. Continue reading
Read 10/06/2021-28/06/2021
Rating 4 stars
My second read for the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge is Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss. I’ve known Aldiss’s name in relation to science fiction for a while but never read anything by him. I picked this novel up in Bookmark, a second hand bookshop in Falmouth, drawn by its cover art.
It is simultaneously, as with most science fiction, a reflection on concerns about the contemporaneous era, and a projection of where current science might lead. It is also a meditation on Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
My reading life is in a minor slump. I’m enjoying Frankenstein Unbound, but not enough to feel compelled to pick it up each day and finish it. Today I read an interview with the actor Rafe Spall that I’d missed when it was published back in May. I wouldn’t have had the same response to it back then, mind you. It was one of those serendipitous stumblings that spoke to me in a particular moment.
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Read 16/05/2021-25/05/2021
Rating 3 stars
Blood Wedding is a psychological crime novel by French writer Pierre Lemaitre. It concerns Sophie, a woman with severe memory loss who, at the start of the book, is looking after a young boy on the days and nights that his busy parents can’t be there. When we meet Sophie, disaster has struck. Continue reading
Read 21/02/2021-26/02/2021
Rating 5 stars
Permafrost is the first novel by Catalan poet Eva Baltasar. It’s a thing of beauty, visceral and uncompromising. It’s about depression, and being cared about but not loved; it’s the story of someone who tries not to let others in because being self-contained is safer. It’s also deeply, dryly funny.
Read 15/11/2020-23/11/2020
Rating 5 stars
Stasiland has the subtitle Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. In it, Anna Funder shares the experiences of a number of East Germans to build a picture of life under an oppressive regime. Her interviewees range from people who tried to escape, people separated arbitrarily from family overnight, and people who worked for the Stasi. There are amazing people between these pages who survived unimaginable horrors, and there are also the people who supported the use of those horrors. I found it a very moving book. Continue reading
Read 27/09/2020-04/10/2020
Rating 4 stars
Dorthe Nors’ fifth novel examines the crisis of middle age as experienced by a single woman estranged from her sister and trying to work out what she wants from life. It’s a funny and moving book, with a deadpan humour that wrong foots the reader from time to time with its seriousness. Continue reading
What I Think About When I Think About Reading 