Tag: fiction

Book review: The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén

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Queer, atmospheric, and lyrical, The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén is a noirish drama. 

Only two things have come with me all the way to New York City from south of the Mason-Dixon Line: a bottle of Wild Turkey from what I once called home and an orange telephone.

In 1950’s New York, two Shakespearean actors marry for convenience. Margaret Shoard, who struggles with her mental health, marries her best friend Wesley. He is trying to avoid the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his relations with men. The two are asexual soul mates. 

We were all of us strays, blacklisted or rich enough yet stymied by arrest records, the city’s shiniest if unpalatable dross.

Margaret plays Lady Macbeth on opening night. She identifies a little too much with her character which leads to a mental breakdown. She can’t work so wanders the streets of New York and takes prescription medication to get through her aimless days. After Wesley is hired to perform at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in the New Mexico desert over the summer, Margaret thinks this opportunity might be just what she needs. It could help her get her mojo back.

Every day of mine is a gift

What unfolds is drug fueled months of complicated arrangements with another theatre employee. The threesome results in a pregnancy, visitations from Lady Macbeth, and abuse.

Her gaze was bright and glittering with drink. She was the sort who held her liquor by way of deepened elegance and wit rather than sloppy dissolution.

Love, betrayal, female rage, self-discovery, theatre mobsters, and plenty of nods to the Bard can be found in The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf. Content warning the story includes sexual assault, self-harm, murder and substance abuse. 

Book review: The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

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Plot twists abound in domestic suspense/psychological thriller The Housemaid by Freida McFadden. It’s got a feel of Sleeping With the Enemy meets Single White Female with its volatile domestic setting. The story involves a wealthy couple, Andrew and Nina. Their hired help, Millie, lives in a room in the attic.  

Sometimes people do exactly what you think they’re going to do, and they still manage to disappoint you.

Homeless ex-con Millie is hired by the frumpy, volatile, and slightly unhinged Nina. Her job is to keep house for Nina, her hot charming husband Andrew, and her precocious blonde daughter. The women of the household always wear white. 

“My mother always says the only way two people can keep a secret,” she says, “is if one of them is dead”.

Millie thinks Nina has hired her without looking into her past. She’s a little taken aback when shown to her small attic room. The window in the room won’t open, and the door has a lock on the outside. She decides to believe that the room was once just a storage cupboard, and it’s better than a prison cell. 

Then again, plenty of men are idiots.

There is also Enzo, the non-English speaking gardener who lurks outside muttering in Italian that the place is not safe. Millie assumes it’s because Nina is so difficult. 

Dad always says that if you’re going to do something wrong, at least be smart enough not to let anybody see you do it.

The Housemaid is full of plot twists, bizarre behaviour, and secrets and lies, like any good psychological thriller. Millie and Nina’s narration takes the reader on a roller coaster ride. Their crazy domestic life includes a doozie of a twist at the end. It’s a compelling fast read for lovers of domestic suspense. The Housemaid left me feeling like my life is comfortably pedestrian. 

Book review: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

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The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong is a poetic rendering. It is also a bleak story, both beautiful and sad.

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

The Emperor of Gladness is set in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. Nineteen year old Hai stands on a bridge looking down at the river and contemplating jumping. He is interrupted by an old woman who threatens to call the police if he doesn’t climb down.

Words cast spells. You should know this as a writer. That’s why it’s called spelling, Labas.

The woman is eighty-two year old Grazina from Lithuania with mid-stage dementia. She demands that Hai come to her when he climbs down, and she adopts him. 

You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.

Hai moves in with Grazina and becomes her carer and friend. He also rifles through her medicine cabinet looking for medications to feed his addiction. 

The prisons and madhouses have locked them up, so you think you’re the only one out there losing your mind when in fact there are many like you, trapped in this supposedly free world of work and sleep and endless fucking cakes.

Meanwhile, Hai’s Vietnamese mother thinks he has gone to medical school in Boston. Hai continues this charade, calling his mother to give her updates on his studies, for much of the novel. As Grazina’s mental state worsens, Hai uses various role plays to assist her. Her delusional episodes make her relive distressing scenes from her escape from Nazi-occupied Europe.

It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day, and long after midnight you could still feel its sticky film on your skin as you lie awake in your room, the fan blowing in what remained of the scorched hours, and realize for the first time in your peep of a life that no one is ever truly alone.

The Emperor of Gladness is about grief, addiction, despair, poverty, sadness and trauma. There is also an enduring hope in the friendship that develops between Hai and Grazina.

Book review: The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

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I am a fan of magical realism done well. And I loved the oddness of The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin.

I’m not so weird to me.

Toru Okada quit his legal job in Tokyo, making his wife the primary breadwinner. After they lost their cat, Okada seeks help from a psychic. Then his wife Kumiko goes to work one day and does not return. Okada is overwhelmed by the loss, but the psychics take an interest in helping him. They even start appearing in his dreams. The psychics also have a connection to Kumiko’s brother, a rising politician, whom Okada doesn’t like. After Okada’s wife disappears, he is forced to meet her brother several times. He does this in an attempt to find her and win her back. 

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Okada becomes fascinated by an old soldier’s story. The tale is about being thrown into a Mongolian desert well by his captors at the start of WWII. Okada decides to drop down into a dry well in the yard of a deserted house next door to think.

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.

Okada’s teenage neighbour, May, calls Okada Mr Windup Bird after the call of a bird he describes to her. They share a fascination in death, and this almost kills him when the teenager traps him in the well. While in the well, he has an out of body experience. This leaves him with a bluish mark on his cheek, a representation of the transformation he then undertakes.

I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

Dislocation, alienation and nameless fears abound in The Windup Bird Chronicle. The story is an examination of both the challenges of modern life and the shadow side of Japan. 

Book review: If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura

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If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura is a short quirky novel translated from Japanese by Eric Selland.

 I wonder why people always expect from others things that they themselves can’t or won’t do.

After a visit to the doctor, a thirty year old postman discovers he has a terminal brain tumour. He’s a pretty pedestrian guy. He has few friends and is estranged from his father. He is out of touch with his ex girlfriend and lives with his cat, Cabbage. Cabbage gains the power of speech during the novel. 

Love has to end. That’s all. And even though everyone knows it they still fall in love. I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it has to end. 

The postman decides to make a bucket list. He arrives home to find the devil in a Hawaiian shirt sitting on his sofa. The devil is called Aloha and he has a proposition. He will grant the postman an extra day of life for each item he agrees that the devil can remove entirely from the world.

In order to gain something, you have to lose something.

The first object the postman selects is phones. No big drama. The absence of phones just seems to make people more engaged with the world. Clocks and movies are next. The postman uses his extra days to connect with people that have had meaning in his life. The agreement works swimmingly until Aloha suggests that cats should disappear from the world. Then the postman has to start weighing up the real value of his own life.

I don’t know whether I’m happy or unhappy. But there’s one thing I do know. You can convince yourself to be happy or unhappy. It just depends on how you choose to see things.

If Cats Disappeared from the World delves into themes such as grief and love. It explores what makes life worth living and the importance of human connection.  

Book review: Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

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Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa is a historical fiction work about trauma (trigger warning). It is a tense, emotional and absorbing read. The story is narrated by a Palestine woman, Nahr, from solitary confinement. She has spent years in a small cement prison cell as a political prisoner. After a sympathetic guard provides her with pencils and a notebook Nahr begins to fill the pages with an account of her life.

I colonized the colonizer’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.

Nahr and her family had been displaced many times. From Kuwait, her country of birth, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, her ancestral homeland. Nahr was subject to an arranged marriage at a young age to a Palestinian man who subsequently abandoned her. She was then tricked and blackmailed into becoming a sex worker by a women called Um Buraq. The exploitation gave her financial independence, but she also lost faith in love and men.

This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.

Eventually Nahr traveled to Palestine to seek a divorce. Through her husbands brother she got involved with a group of young resistance fighters. This is how she ended up being locked in the concrete cube accused of being a terrorist. 

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Against the Loveless World is much more than a story about personal trauma and the violence of conflict and war. It is a novel about politics, displacement, the desire for belonging, gender, survival and love. A very powerful read.

Book review: The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe

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The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe is primarily a cosy crime mystery. There is also an element of political auto-fiction. Part of the story is set as Queen Elizabeth II dies. It also incorporates Liz Truss’s 45-day reign as British Prime Minister and explores why things fell apart. 

Any act of writing must also, by definition, be an act of selection; therefore distortion; and therefore invention.

After university Phyl finds herself back living with her parents and working in a Japanese food cafe at Heathrow, Terminal 5. Her ambitions to become a writer are not taking shape. That is until Chris, a political blogger and old university friend of her mother’s, comes to stay. Chris sparks an interest in cosy mysteries and auto-fiction for Phyl. 

How is someone like me supposed to survive in a world like this? Everything that defines me is unsuited for it. My passivity. My idealism. My innocence. I just don’t have what it takes

Chris is planning to attend a far-right conference as he is looking into a think tank hellbent on privatising the National Health Service. He is concerned about his personal safety. And has reason to be.

See it. Say it. Sorted

The conference is being held in a country house in the Cotswolds. It is complete with secret passages and a cast of extreme and eccentric characters who become murder suspects. Chris is murdered, leaving behind a cryptic note.

The presumption of innocence is now the presumption of guilt. The burden of proof is a travesty because the proof is often lies

Detective Inspector Pru Freeborne, on the cusp of retirement, investigates. Meanwhile Phyl is convinced that Chris’s death is linked to dead author Peter Cockerill. Phyl and Chris’s adopted daughter, Rashida, start their own investigation into his death.

You murdered a man to get what you wanted. You murdered another man in order to keep your secret safe. And yet the good fortune that it’s brought you still isn’t enough. You remind me of the people at that conference. Remaking the world in their own image and still not liking what they see.

The Proof of My Innocence is a complex story. Political plotting, a complicated whodunnit, gender and intergenerational issues. Even the title is constructed from homonyms.  Proof as in an early copy of a publication and evidence. And innocence as both naivety and a lack of guilt. 

Book review: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

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Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami is a story about friendship, unrequited love and loneliness. The story revolves around three characters.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

The narrator, K, is in love with his best friend Sumire. The protagonist, Sumire is in love with Mia, a woman 17 years her senior who is also her boss.

We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

K and Sumire spend hours on the phones in deep conversation about life, desire, sexuality and writing. Sumire is an unconventional aspiring novelist. K is a solitary intelligent primary school teacher. K’s unrequited love roots a deep longing and loneliness in him.

Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

The exotic Mui employs Sumire in her wine company despite her limited skills or qualifications.  Mui has no idea Sumire is infatuated with her. 

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

Sumire and Mui go on a business trip. They end up on a Greek Island for a holiday after a house is offered to them over the summer by a couple of gay men they meet.

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

One night K receives a distressing call from Mui imploring him to get on a plane immediately and go to the island. It is something to do with Sumire so he goes without question.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

This is where the novel turns into a mystery. Sumire has disappeared without a trace from the island. It seems impossible without anyone noticing anything. Enter magical realism.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

Sputnik Sweetheart is a short, cleanly crafted, story about existence, identity, what is real and what is hidden. As is common in Japanese literature Sputnik Sweetheart is a simple story with plenty of depth.

Book review: Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

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Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami has two narratives. The hard-boiled narrative involves an unnamed Tokyo data processor who works for an entity called the System. He becomes involved with a scientist and his granddaughter after the scientist hires the narrator to launder and shuffle his research data. 

I never trust people with no appetite. It’s like they’re always holding something back on you.

The parallel end of the world narrative is set in a walled city where people are separated from their shadows and lose their minds. In this world the narrator is hired as a Dreamreader. The two narrators are linked by the Tokyo protagonists mind being shuffled into the end of the world.

I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next.

The story is as weird and layered as the title, but also totally engaging (despite a little sexism and cringe worthy fatphobic language at times, though it was first published in 1985). Speculative fiction and magical realism meets hard-boiled detective story. There’s even unicorns.

Huge organizations and me don’t get along. They’re too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World explores subconsciousness and consciousness, how identity and memory are formed by the stories we tell ourselves, and fate and free will. There’s a whiff of Kafkaesque and Orwellian existential meditations…

Book review: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

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The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is a dystopian novel set on a remote island off the coast of Japan where objects – hats, roses, birds, boats – disappear at the hand of an unknown power. The disappearances are reinforced by the Memory Police, and the island population’s memories of the objects fade until they can’t remember their existence at all. Disappearances escalate, and one morning people wake up and their left legs have disappeared – their very essence is thinning. Even nature submits and seasons disappears. The world of the island inhabitants gradually shrinks and loses meaning, but there are a small number of people who retain memories. The Memory Police seek them out, round them up, and take them away. 

People—and I’m no exception—seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.

The characters are unnamed. The narrator is an author, and she and an old man who is a family friend decide to hide the author’s friend and editor, R, beneath her floorboards in a hidden room when they realise he has memories and is at risk. The room also accumulates what can be salvaged of the things that are disappearing.

I suppose memories live here and there in the body. But they’re invisible, aren’t they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone. If no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed.

There is also a story with the story – excerpts from a manuscript that the narrator has been writing about a typist who can only communicate through typing as she has lost her voice. She’s held hostage by her typing teacher and lover in a tower. When novels disappear, R encourages the author to keep writing as a means of preservation. 

Men who start by burning books end by burning other men

Beautifully written in quiet poetic prose with the slow creep of tension, the novel explores memory and its role in identity, connection, loss and isolation, as well as the perils of authoritarianism and the power of art and storytelling as a vehicle for resistance. The story asks us to consider our identity and our relationship to the world around us. It also made me consider mortality as the novel reminded me a little of what happens when we start to die and parts of our bodies succumb to illness or old age, memories fade and friends disappear.