July 2023 Books
The Great
Beloved by Toni Morrison
This novel is no easy read. It is one of Morrison’s best-known works, but it is challenging both emotionally and at a text level. It follows Sethe—a formerly enslaved woman—and her family, living in Ohio in the aftermath of the American Civil War (and therefore the abolition of slavery). The novel opens describing how her house is haunted by the ghost of one of her daughters, but the strange equilibrium of this household is soon overturned by an arrival from her past. A man who had been enslaved with her years before turns up on her doorstep and ends up staying, causing a thorough reckoning with the pain of all their pasts. If you have any concerns, I really recommend looking at the content warnings for this on Storygraph before you dive in, or researching more about the plotline, as it is deeply unsettling.
As with many Morrison novels, you have to do a lot of work here patching up the storyline, with many references made early on to events the reader won’t know about until the end of the novel. The best way to approach it is to note down (either mentally or literally) anything that seems confusing or out of place, allowing the mystery to slowly unravel over the course of the pages. Doing this also helps you see the mastery at work with the way Morrison manages different threads of the story. The prose style is dreamlike, uncanny, almost nightmarish, and she moves through different modes throughout, from first- to third-person, through different perspectives and interludes of sections that are practically prose poetry. It is thick with the psychic pain of her characters. She also moves through time a lot here, jumping back and forth sometimes from sentence to sentence with very little signposting, so it’s good to be aware of this and read carefully for it.
Now this might not sound like I’m being very complimentary, but Morrison, in my opinion, was one of the best writers ever to put pen to paper. This book’s treatment of slavery is justifiably one of the best in fiction, and it is an important read for being so uncomfortable. It makes you work because it is important that you work, to even begin to understand the perspectives of its characters. Every sentence, every word is considered, the meanings and imagery so layered and nuanced that as a lover of literature, it is incredible to read her work and her command over language, plotting, and character. Reading this with book club helped deepen my understanding of this novel, and it was also very rewarding on a second read (I read it first quite a few years ago now). I recommend this one to everyone, but I would start with a different Morrison first to get the feel of how her novels function; Sula is a great place to begin.
Broken Earth by N. K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season/The Obelisk Gate/The Stone Sky)
I listened to these this month, and (thankfully, considering I wrote my MA dissertation on them) once again found them to be incredibly powerful, unique works of speculative fiction. I was still finding new stuff in there even after many re-reads, and spending months poring over them. I think it might have been the act of listening that helped bring out new points of interest. I will say I really enjoyed listening to them and thought the narrator was great, but I don’t know how successful it would have been if I had no sense of the world beforehand. I think you might just about be able to get away with it for the first two books, but I’d recommend reading the final book at least, if possible, as there are a lot of new ideas and shifts in perspective in there.
Which is one of the things I love about these novels; how they build on one another. They are a true testament to Jemisin having a really strong idea of the whole story when she was writing, which cannot be said of other authors of fantasy series… By the time you reach the end, you have gone on such a journey with the characters, and so much of the earlier parts of the series begin to make sense. And the ideas, guys, the ideas. Jemisin’s imagination knows no bounds here, and she makes sense of our twisted conceptions of power, race, family, oppression through an almost completely alien world. I literally wrote thousands of words on the subject.
It's true her prose does grate on some people—she uses second-person for much of the novels, and it feels (intentionally) coarse for this coarse world—and her characters are often prickly and unlikeable (particularly our protagonist, Essun), but I think it only serves to make the conclusion of this series more powerful. She is not the best prose stylist out there, but she does at least have a distinct feel to her work, and clearly writes with care and attention. And the plotting is propulsive and well-managed. Need I emphasise the ideas again?
Also, it was surprisingly very interesting reading this alongside Beloved. Both authors clearly use similar historical references in slavery and the experience of African American people but in wholly different novels (like, really on different ends of the spectrum stylistically). And yet both have such resonances in what they say about life as an oppressed people, of parenting and the family unit under the yoke of slavery or oppression. It was fascinating to see where the two diverged and converged over the course of their work.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Another great re-read for me. As a person that recommends books, sometimes quite aggressively (sorry), sometimes I worry that a book might not actually be all that, especially if it’s been a while since I read it. But we read this for Books on Film this month and it was f*cking fantastic. This is some of VanderMeer’s best work.
We’re following ‘the biologist’ into Area X, a mysterious phenomenon whereby a whole area (of what is definitely VanderMeer’s local Florida) has been subsumed by some sort of unearthly border, one that prevents any communication in or out, and inside strange things are happening to the landscape and wildlife. An organisation called the Southern Reach keeps sending expeditions in, only the people disappear, or they come back decidedly, uncannily changed, riddled with cancer. The biologist’s voice is compulsively readable, the strangeness deeply writ into her narration. The setting is unsettling, with those tinges of horror that VanderMeer is well known for. If I had the time I’d read the rest of the series again immediately. All of VanderMeer’s hallmarks are here; the slippage between human and nonhuman, the blurring of boundaries, the undermining of any sort of scientific objectivity and factual knowledge.
Love by Toni Morrison
Love is told across two timelines, where the secrets of the past continue to haunt the characters of the present. In the present, we follow two reclusive women in a decades-long feud over Bill Cosey, the grandfather of one, husband of the other. It is both over his estate but also his memory, their memories, of the past. Into this household comes bold Junior, a girl just released from Correctional, who wants to use these women to her advantage. Again, Morrison reveals to us over the course of the novel what it is that caused such bad blood between the women, and the legacy of Cosey, who ran a successful hotel patronised by affluent African Americans in the 1950s. The beginning feels almost thriller-like, but then we settle into the different perspectives, learning the community and their history. It is atmospheric, scenic in its depiction of life by the sea. There is a real feeling of life to Morrison’s writing in all her books, the characters spring off the page, they have a real vitality to them. It is not my absolute favourite Morrison, this one, I perhaps didn’t feel as involved and close to the characters as I have in other books, but every single one I’ve read so far has been worth reading. It has also been fascinating to see how each of her books speaks to the others, and yet also feels different in both content and atmosphere.
Recitatif by Toni Morrison
The only short story Morrison wrote; “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial”. This immediately brought Paradise to mind, where Morrison does something similar, but in this story it is very much the central theme. And she does it very well, because of course, the experiment is ultimately with you the reader. Prompting you to try and work it out, then perhaps prompting you to question why you’re trying to work it out, and why you might pick this or that thing that would distinguish one character as white, the other Black. No word is wasted here, each scene delicately carved. And yet, whilst I appreciated the reading of this, I think her longer work is where she excels. It is in the grand unravelling of her plots that she is doing her best work, so whilst I recommend this one highly as always, I think her novels are her masterpieces.
Death With Interruptions by José Saramago
This book was a lovely surprise! It’s about a country where death stops working, and I had in my head that it would be a challenging read, quite dark and gothic, or perhaps weird in a precursor-to-China-Miéville sort of way. But it wasn’t at all! Instead, it was quite funny, quite touching, and also very clever.
The first half of the book focuses on the country as a whole. We read the reactions of whole industries under threat (insurance companies, undertakers), as well as the government and the Church. The novel has a run-on sentence style that would usually put the fear into me, but in this case I felt it really helped the novel to flow and move in interesting ways. This section was often amusing, and also just interesting in a thought experiment kind of way, as Saramago looks at all the curious paradoxes that a situation like this would create.
The second half of the novel focuses on death herself (yes, with a lowercase ‘d’). I won’t spoil too much more of the plotline, but this shift comes at just the right time when you as the reader might be craving a more intimate look at this world. It is absurd; staunchly pragmatic and realistic in some ways and yet with this strong fantastical cut in the narrative that adds such interesting light and shade. And death is wonderful, and the arc of her story is really quite moving. The life and death theme is well-handled, there would be so much to find in here I think on a second read, even. I would definitely like to read more Saramago in the future.
The Good
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
This was a really interesting novel, but I can’t say the reading of it was very enjoyable, and in fact it took me quite a long time to get through it. I do think it was a worthy winner of the International Booker though. In it, a man called Gaustine invents ‘time shelters’, essentially old people’s homes where they recreate specific years from the past in meticulous detail so that those with dementia might feel at home in their environment. This sparks a dangerous virus of nostalgia that sweeps the whole of Europe, with Gospodinov obviously nodding to the waves of nationalism and fascism sweeping many nations, and in the case of his home country Bulgaria, a nostalgia for their socialist past, too. Countries hold referendums on the past, deciding which decade they’ll live in, obviously creating chaos in the process.
It is told in short little vignettes and chapters, with a loose storyline following our narrator (who also seems to have invented Gaustine himself in a metafictional twist) as he finds himself lost in these timelines, having a home in no particular form of nostalgia. Some of these sections are great, others lost my interest (particularly through the middle of the book). But whilst perhaps the propulsion that I like in my books wasn’t there, this novel is infinitely quotable, and there are some really fascinating takes on the concept of time throughout. I think it’s very much worth reading, but perhaps knowing that it won’t be a wholly absorbing novel will help.
The Fine
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
I don’t think I’m going to be an O’Farrell girlie, and that’s okay. This novel was too messy for me, and not taut or controlled enough. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Mantel really ruined me for historical fiction, at least the very literary kind. Here I could almost feel that O’Farrell did not have a distinct plan for her character or plotline as she was writing, and the symbolism was very heavy-handed at times. This is really about your taste when you’re reading; do you like this more free-flowing style, or something worked with more precision? I’m definitely the latter, but I can see why the former appeals to people too. As I passed the 100-page point, I tried to let go of my expectations of the style, and went with it a bit more, and I do think the plot also picks up at this point. It follows Lucrezia de’ Medici, married off at a young age to a cruel Duke, who may or may not have murdered her. But yes, I was disappointed in this one. I’m not jumping to read Hamnet, let’s put it that way (though I know lots of people prefer it).
