Tag: contemporary fiction

Review 2500: Novellas in November! Such Small Hands

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I decided to make more of an effort to participate in Novellas in November this year, more than accidentally reviewing a novella in November, that is, so I started looking at lists. When I first went for classic novellas, I was finding the same kinds of things, many of which I considered novels, not novellas, so I just tried search for novellas in general. I finally found this intriguing list on Literary Hub, the 50 Best Contemporary Novels Less Than 200 Pages. I picked out a few books from it, most of which I was unfamiliar with.

The quotes on the back of this very short book (101 pages) use words like “chilling” and “terrifying.” I was nearly halfway through it feeling that it was a little strange but certainly not terrifying. So, I did a little looking around, as I sometimes do when I feel like I’m not quite with it. That led me to find out something I wish I didn’t know ahead of time. So, don’t do this! If you choose to read the novel, you’ll find it out in the Afterword.

Marina’s parents died after a car accident. She herself was badly injured and hospitalized for some time. At seven years old with no relatives, she is placed in an orphanage. The other girls, whose point of view is represented as a group, love and are repelled by her, so they make her an outcast. And there is something odd about her. When anyone asks her about her family, she uses the same words, with no affect.

Marina’s only possession besides an odd selection of clothes from her house is a doll the psychologist gave her. Marina, rejected, plays constantly with the doll. Eventually, the other girls steal, destroy, and bury it.

These descriptions sound a little odd, but what is very unusual is the way the unspoken thoughts of the children are expressed in the text. It’s lyrical, and as I mentioned before, the other girls are treated as one. References in reviews speak of a Greek chorus, but to me it seemed stranger than that.

I’m not going to say more about this except that the events and aura of the novel become stranger as it goes on. If you are interested, you most likely won’t be disappointed. And what the heck! It’s only 100 pages long. Read it!

Related Posts

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The Bloody Chamber

The Wicked Boy

Review 2484: The Heather Blazing

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland’s high court. When the novel opens, he is reconsidering his decision in a complex case and at the same time getting ready to leave for his summer house in Cush. The novel follows him back and forth in time as he examines his relationships with his deceased father and his wife.

His wife Carmel complains twice in the novel that he is distant, and she finds him unknowable. Toíbín presents us with a description of his everyday actions and key moments in his life, but we never understand how he feels about these things. However, there is a warmer ending to this novel, in which there seems to be human interaction in his future.

The descriptions of the Irish coastline, where Toíbín himself spent every summer, are beautiful. And sad, because the landscape is changing—the cliffs are being eaten by the sea.

This is Toíbín’s second novel. It is moody, sometimes a little funny, but mostly sad. As with Toíbín’s character, I felt a bit removed from it.

Related Posts

The Empty Family

Nora Webster

Brooklyn

Review 2481: Memorial

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Benson is a young Black gay man living in Houston with his Japanese boyfriend Mike. When Mike’s mother is due to arrive for a visit for the first time in years, Mike tells Benson that his father is dying and he’s going to Osaka to be with him, leaving his mother with Benson, who has never met her before.

While Benson navigates the situation with Mitsuko, Mike’s mother, he also considers his relationship with Mike, which has been deteriorating lately. For his part, Mike must work through his resentment that his father deserted him and his mother when he was a teen. That, and Eiju’s general prickliness.

This novel explores the difficulties both men have had with their families and their relationships with each other. Each man also tentatively begins getting to know another gay young man.

Although this novel is supposed to be funny, the humor went right over my head. I found it perceptive and sometimes touching, although I am not a fan of explicit sex scenes. I read it for my James Tait Black project.

Related Posts

Real Life

Edinburgh

Murmur

Review 2480: Glory

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I tried really hard to finish this book, as it is on my Booker Prize project list. I read more than half the book, but it was really not for me. Despite raves by critics, for me it was a DNF.

The novel fairly straightforwardly covers the recent history of Zimbabwe, beginning with the overthrow of Robert Mugabe but then going back in time to show the beginning of his reign of terror. The twist is that all the characters are animals. Everyone is giving the nod to Animal Farm, but Bulawayo credits a cultural background of using talking animals in stories. Both novels are satires and deal with the use of language, though.

Although using animals as characters does nothing for me, I also felt as if it did nothing for the book except make the characters emblematic—hence, undeveloped and one-sided. What was worse for me was being subjected to so much political and religious speech. The first chapter is 30 pages long and consists almost entirely of one speech after another lauding the Father of the Nation, known as Old Horse, on the occasion of the anniversary of the revolution.

In the next chapter we learn that Dr. Sweet Mother, his wife, intends to take the position from him. Only there is a coup by the vice president, Tuvius Delight Shasha, and at least in the next 200 pages, we never hear from her again.

Next, there is supposed to be a free and fair election, so everyone gets excited, but you can guess how that turns out.

I quit because the plot finally seemed to be moving a little with the return of a goat named Destiny who has been missing for 10 years, but then we got yet another chapter where the different views of the election are aired. I just couldn’t take it. I wasn’t enjoying one word.

This is going to be a book you either love or hate, although in glancing at some reviews, I was astonished to see a five-star review by a person who only read 50 pages and then blamed her dislike on herself. At 400 pages, this novel is extremely repetitive, going over and over the same tropes, sometimes repeating a word or phrase many times for emphasis, and using the word “tholukuthi,” which is a word for emphasis, sometimes several times in the same sentence.

The characters have no depth and there is no real character development. There are lots and lots of political speeches and sermons.

This novel is deemed important because of its look in the recent history of Zimbabwe. Maybe it would have been too difficult to read with people as characters, but it would have been much more readable and relatable for me.

Related Posts

We Need New Names

This Mournable Body

Afterlives

Review 2470: The Topeka School

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

It’s unfortunate for me that Ben Lerner’s books seem to be devoted mostly to exploring his own psyche, as evidenced by his main character’s biographical details matching his own, because I’m not much interested in his psyche. Sadly, his books keep ending up on the shortlists of the projects I’m pursuing. This one is from the shortlist for the 2020 Pulitzer prize.

In The Topeka School, we encounter Adam Gordon, the protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station. In this novel, he is sometimes older, sometimes younger than in the other, but the bulk of the novel is set in 1997, when Adam is a senior in high school.

Adam is the son of two psychoanalysts who work at the Foundation, a prestigious psychiatric hospital. His mother Jane has become famous by publishing a popular book about the relationships between men and women, and his father Jonathan works mostly with disturbed teenage boys. Adam is navigating relationships with friends, sex with his girlfriend Amber, and preparations for debating competitions.

Lerner has a fascination with words, and words play an important part in the novel. For example, Adam’s high school group includes a boy named Darren he’s grown up with who is behind developmentally. Although the group has been taught not to leave Darren out, inclusion involves submitting him to indignities, like leaving him to walk home from the lake after a party. But mostly, he is called names. Names are what hurts him most.

Aside from being a champion debater, Adam likes to participate in rapping with his friends (I’m probably using the wrong words) even while realizing that he and his upper-middle-class friends have little in common with the people they’re imitating and no true understanding of the idioms they’re using.

We also periodically check in with Darren, who has feelings he can’t express. And there’s Jane, who begins receiving abusive phone calls from men after her book is published. She responds by pretending that the phone connection is poor, so she can’t hear, which eventually makes them hang up.

One of the funniest scenes in the book is the first one, where Adam is in a boat with his girlfriend at night. He is pontificating about something only to realize that his girlfriend has left the boat and swum to shore. Later, when he finds her again, she tells a story about sneaking out of the room while her stepfather is talking, and he doesn’t notice that no one is there. Adam does not at this point understand what this story has to do with him.

Then there is a type of debating described in great detail, where the object is to present as many points as possible as fast as possible even if they are ridiculous, because the opponent loses points for missing an argument. And at several points, characters speak gibberish .

All the while, there is a tension going on between Adam’s pro-feminist familial upbringing and the hyper-masculine society he’s lived in as a young man. Unfortunately, although Jane is a great character, she isn’t very important in the novel. Nor are the other women. Only Adam is important.

The novel explores the past of the family and how it affects the present, using Jonathan, Jane, and Adam as narrators. But really, almost all of it is about Adam.

Related Posts

Leaving the Atocha Station

Edinburgh

Straight Man

Review 2462: Weyward

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Bookish Beck has a meme called “book serendipity” where she finds things in common between books she’s read recently, and I have a doozy. Not to give too much away, but this is the second book I’ve read in two weeks where women decide that the only way to deal with their abusive husbands is to murder them.

This novel is set in three time frames. In 1619, Altha is being tried for witchcraft. In 2019, Kate has discovered she is pregnant, so she has decided she must leave her abusive boyfriend, Simon. She has inherited a cottage from her Aunt Violet that he doesn’t know about and she has quietly saved some money, so she goes. In 1942, Violet has grown up isolated, not even allowed to go to the village and never told anything about her mother. At 16, she is jealous of her brother Graham, who is allowed to study interesting topics while she is forced into a traditional feminine role. She wants to travel the world and study bugs, but her father has apparently already chosen a husband for her.

Back at the cottage, Kate begins looking into her family history, into the women who called themselves the Weywards and have an unusual connection to animals.

This is an interesting novel with supernatural overtones that are fairly slight. I was interested in all three stories, although I found the outcomes of Altha’s and Kate’s stories fairly easy to guess. In this novel, I wasn’t as disturbed by the husband murder as I was in the other novel, in which I thought the wife could have easily gotten away. In any case, almost all the men in this novel are rotten to the core. So yes, I liked this novel fairly well.

Related Posts

Recipe for a Perfect Wife

The Harpy

The Family Upstairs

Review 2456: The Wren, The Wren

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Just a quick note before my review: I’ll be posting during the next three weeks from various locations in the U. S., and Europe. So, my reviews may come out at funny times or may even be sporadic. I hope not.

The Wren, The Wren is the story of three generations of an Irish family and how they are affected by the desertion of a father.

The first section of the novel is narrated by Nell, the granddaughter of the Irish poet, Phil McDaragh. At first, her section is delightful—exuberant, funny, it made me laugh out loud. But then she unfortunately falls in love with Felim, neglectful and abusive.

The next section is from the point of view of Carmel, Nell’s mother and Phil’s daughter. She has a close relationship with Nell until Nell’s teen years, but she is haunted by memories of her father, who deserted his family while Carmel’s mother Terry was ill with cancer. It is Carmel’s memory that the last thing he did before he left was throw a tantrum about a missing wristwatch, which Carmel later spots on his wrist during a TV interview.

We briefly see a few things from Phil’s point of view, mostly about his own childhood, and chapters are separated by his poetry or by old songs translated from Celtic. There is a lot of bird imagery in all the sections. The McDaraghs are conscious of birds.

This is a powerful novel about lasting damage from a harmful act and the time it can take to heal. It is often funny, with a dry humor, and just as often sad.

Related Posts

The Green Road

The Gathering

So Late in the Day

Review 2452: La Rochelle

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

Mark Chopra is a neurologist who lives alone and has apparently never had a partner. He also seems at first to have no friends except a much younger couple, Ian and Laura. The draw there is Laura, with whom he is in love. As for friends, it gradually becomes clear that he has other friends, but he disregards them.

Mark judges the stories Laura has told him and his own observations and thinks that Ian doesn’t treat Laura the way she deserves. At the pub at the start of the novel, Ian tells Mark that Laura has left him to think about their future. He doesn’t know where she is and doesn’t look for her, saying she’ll come back when she’s ready.

Mark is a highly intelligent person who tends to overthink things. He starts worrying about Laura, thinking she could have had an accident or even have been kidnapped. But he does nothing except hang out with Ian every night, getting so drunk that he can’t remember things and smells like booze at work. He ignores the warnings of coworkers (his other friends that he doesn’t seem to recognize) about his job.

Toward the end of the novel, Mark finally does something, but the trip there wasn’t pleasant for me. Mark is not a reliable narrator. He knows more than he tells until toward the end of the novel. But I also found him an unpleasant person. Despite being, he finally claims, willfully abstinent, he seems to think of women only in terms of sex. He meets a couple and immediately wonders how often they have sex. He makes constant demeaning comments about female anatomy. He expresses his gratitude toward a female friend and coworker by mentioning her bra size! Is this supposed to be a side effect of Mark’s lifestyle choice? Is it supposed to be funny? I have no idea. I found this character to be deeply unpleasant despite his desire to be a knight errant for Laura. It was no surprise at all to me to find him ultimately having no interest in what he finally gets, even though it’s what he wanted.

The plot eventually has some surprises, but after a labyrinthian scheme finally reveals itself, the whole idea just seemed stupid to me. The characters go to all kinds of trouble instead of speaking a single sentence. (I think Roger Ebert used to call that the “idiot plot,” in reference to movies.) I really wouldn’t have finished this book if it hadn’t been part of my James Tait Black project.

Related Posts

Amsterdam

The Sense of an Ending

Eileen

Review 2446: The Collected Regrets of Clover

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Clover is a death doula who is still in mourning for her grandfather. She is a lonely person, but she avoids getting to know new people. At a death café, she meets Sebastian, who seems to want to get to know her, but she avoids him. When he finds out she is a doula, he hires her to be with his grandmother.

Her new neighbor, Sylvia, also wants to get to know her. Clover reluctantly agrees to meet for coffee.

From about page two, I realized this wasn’t the book for me. It had all the earmarks of the manipulative feel-good novels that are so popular now and I dislike. In addition, it was clunky and obvious, especially the flashbacks of her as a child with her grandfather. Brammer doesn’t write a convincing child.

I gave the novel 104 pages to see if it improved, but it didn’t.

Related Posts

A Man Called Ove

Once in a Blue Moon Lodge

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

Review 2441: Real Life

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Almost from the beginning of this novel, I was struck by how morose it seemed. Yet I couldn’t quite figure out why it seemed so much more dour than novels with similar stories, like A Little Life or Shuggie Bain. Both of the main characters in these novels are White, while Wallace, the main character of Real Life, is Black, but is that the difference? It doesn’t seem like it should be.

Wallace is the only Black student in a graduate biochemistry program at an unnamed Midwestern university that is probably the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has been having problems in his program. His supervising professor, Simone, seems to disapprove of him, and he has been blamed for the carelessness of another student, Dana. Simone seems to think Dana is a star. Later in the novel, Dana makes a racist remark to him and then reports him as being a misogynist.

Wallace and his fellow graduate students seem to be working toward their degrees expecting real life to begin once they get them. Wallace, though, is considering how much he wishes to continue despite knowing the degree is his best chance to succeed, as a Black queer man from a poor family.

Wallace has a group of friends he hangs out with, but they are all White and he doesn’t really feel he fits in with them. He is attracted to Miller but doesn’t even know if Miller likes him.

This novel minutely documents a few days in Wallace’s life. The writing is detailed, whether describing Wallace’s experiment, which has been contaminated, perhaps intentionally by Dana, or a character’s eating habits, or a gay sex scene. Wallace faces quite a few slights and insults in just three days, but he doesn’t really defend himself or point them out. He feels he is trying to fit in, but he keeps himself removed from everything, including his friends, by always saying everything is fine, even when it’s clearly not. I felt frustrated several times by his refusal to tell his side of the story or stand up for himself.

I also didn’t understand the violence in his eventual sexual relationship with Miller (who insists he is not gay). In fact, I often didn’t understand characters’ interactions with each other.

Although I believe this novel ended on a slightly more positive note (or did it? it was certainly ironic), it seemed in some ways that Wallace makes things more difficult for himself. Also, although he certainly faces incidents of racism, he also often makes broad judgments about White people, including his friends. I personally also do not enjoy explicit sex scenes, but that’s just me. I read this novel for my Booker Prize project.

Related Posts

A Little Life

Shuggie Bain

To Paradise