Tag: literary fiction

Book review: Second Place by Rachel Cusk

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Long listed for the Booker Prize in 2021, Second Place by Rachel Cusk is about M, a middle aged writer with a past. While the details of that past are never fully explained to the reader, it remains in the forefront due to M’s fears, insecurities and inner demons. The story is narrated as a letter from M to a person called Jeffers. 

Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards

M is an anxious woman who lives on an isolated marshland property with her second husband, the easy going Tony. There are two residences on the property – one, a cottage reserved for guests. M invites famous artist, L, to stay. She hopes to become his muse and that he will be inspired by the landscape.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?

At first L says no, but then an unspecified event that leaves him in financial difficulties leads him to accept. M had imagined him a soulful visionary artist, but finds him a narcissistic and disagreeable individual. L arrives with a wealthy, beautiful and uninvited young woman called Brett in tow. L is not the man M was expecting and the two are immediately at odds. 

I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself.

Justine, M’s twenty one year old daughter and her boyfriend Kurt, a pretentious aspiring writer also come to stay. What follow is a study of the group dynamics, told through M’s eyes.

You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you.

Second place explores power dynamics, gender, motherhood, marriage, aging and art. The carefully crafted, exquisite language of the book is melancholic and unsettling.

Book review: The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

When his family discover that six year old Denny Wallace has become lost in the South Australian Flinder Ranges in September 1883, the farming community join forces to look for him. The story takes place over the seven days of searching, the questions of whether he will be found and in what state permeate. 

Failure is a stooped, pale figure with an open mouth and swollen eyes.

McFarlane introduces a swathe of characters in crisscrossing storylines – the local police officer Robert and his new German wife Minna, Swedish artist and his English wife bess, the well meaning but hapless local priest Mr. Daniels, Aboriginal man Billy Rough, Denny’s tough teenage sister Cissy who insists on joining the search, and Denny himself who’s fear and deteriorating state cause him hallucinations and contribute to him staying lost.

For now he studies what he thinks may be his final true desert sunset. The sky burns and leaps, it gilds and candles—every drenched inch of it, until the sun falls below the ranges. Then the sky darkens. The red returns, stealthy now, with green above and lilac higher still. It deepens into purple. Here’s the strange new cloud, hovering in its own grey light. Then night comes in, black and blue and grey and white, and the moon in its green bag swings heavy over the red nation of the ranges.

As each new character’s perspective is introduced the story deepens and becomes more textured with layers of detail unfolding. The evocative danger and beauty of the outback provides a backdrop to the drama as it unfolds.

Poetically crafted literary fiction with themes including belonging and unbelonging, colonialism, isolation, gender roles.