A free signed copy – and, if I’m honest, a cover reminiscent of Ned Beauman’s Glow – induced me to try an author I’d never heard of. She’s a stand-up A free signed copy – and, if I’m honest, a cover reminiscent of Ned Beauman’s Glow – induced me to try an author I’d never heard of. She’s a stand-up comic, apparently, not that you’d know it from these utterly boring, one-note stories about unhappy adolescents and mums on London council estates. I read 108 pages but could barely tell you what a single story was about. Long is decent at voices, but you need compelling stories to house them.
(3.5) I raced through the first 200 pages or so at the start of the year and loved all the geeky etymological footnotes and musings on translation. I (3.5) I raced through the first 200 pages or so at the start of the year and loved all the geeky etymological footnotes and musings on translation. I thought I’d read it within a matter of days, which would have been a real feat for me. It’s hard to say why, instead, I stalled and found it difficult to regain sustained interest in the months that followed. Initially, it was a buddy read for me and my husband (his bookmark is still stranded at p. 178). His pithy comment, early on, was, “So, this is basically a woke Harry Potter?” And that’s actually a pretty apt summary. Four students at a magical academy – the Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University, also known as Babel – find themselves questioning their responsibilities and loyalties as they confront the forces of evil, specifically colonialism.
When Robin Swift’s mother dies of cholera, he’s rescued from Canton by Professor Lovell and taken to England to train for entrance into Babel, a tower beside the Radcliffe Camera. He, Ramy (Indian), Victoire (Haitian) and Letty, the only white member of the quartet, are soon inseparable. While Victoire and Letty face prejudice for being female, it’s nothing to the experience of being racially other. Luckily, Babel values foreignness: intimate knowledge of other languages is an asset. In Kuang’s speculative 1830s setting, Britain’s economy is founded on a warped alchemy: silver is turned into energy to keep everyday life running smoothly in the industrializing nation. This is accomplished by harnessing the power of words. Silver bars are engraved with match-pairs – a phrase in a foreign language and its closest English counterpart – and the incantation of that untranslatable meaning sparks action. Spells keep bridges standing and traffic flowing; used for ill, they kill and destroy.
Robin and his friends gradually realise that their work at Babel is reinforcing mass poverty and the colonial system and, ultimately, fuelling future wars. “Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others, who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.” He becomes radicalized via the clandestine Hermes Society, which, Robin Hood-like, siphons silver resources away from where they are concentrated in Oxford to where they can help the oppressed. Surprised to learn who else is involved in Hermes, Robin (name not coincidental!) starts working behind the backs of his friends and professors, driven by conscience yet loath to give up the prospects he has through the tremendous privilege of being part of Babel. It goes from being an ivory tower of academia to being a hideaway for strikers and the besieged. And if you know your Bible stories, you’ll remember that Babel is destined to fall.
In faux-archaic fashion, Kuang has given her novel a lengthy subtitle: “Or: The Necessity of Violence – An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.” The principle behind Hermes is that justice will never be achieved by negotiation; only by force. “Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option.” Kuang published this fourth novel at age 26 and it manifests a certain youthful idealism. The sense of retrospective righteous anger is justified but also unsubtle; I felt similarly about Kuang’s Yellowface. Although there are exciting twists in the latter half of the book, I preferred the early semi-Dickensian atmosphere as Robin investigates his parentage and learns the joy of language and friendship. Kuang also adds a queer angle: an unrequited heterosexual crush comes to nothing because two same-sex friends are in love, even if they can never say. For as full-on and high-stakes as the plot becomes, I wished I could stay in this quieter mode.
Kuang has rendered the historical setting admirably and, though this is a typical adventure novel in that she has prioritized action over depth of characterization, one does get invested in the central characters and their interactions. The whole silver-working motif first seems implausible but quickly becomes an accepted part of the background. Longstanding fantasy readers will probably have no problem reading this, but if you’re unsure and daunted by the 540-page length, ask yourself just how interested you are in word meanings and the history of colonialism and uprisings.
Cleverly constructed to give a look at dementia from the inside (unreliable narrator Maud) and the outside as we see her condition advance and her dauCleverly constructed to give a look at dementia from the inside (unreliable narrator Maud) and the outside as we see her condition advance and her daughter’s and carers’ frustrations with her. Missing people, objects, and memories play a key role. The mystery of Elizabeth’s whereabouts both displaces and echoes that of Maud’s sister Sukey’s disappearance just after the Second World War. The ‘clues’ are odd, random-seeming things like a powder compact, stuffed birds under glass, and the growing of marrows. I was relieved that the mysteries were resolved before the end, something I didn’t necessarily expect, but the knowledge that there was closure for the reader but not for Maud herself, who will keep asking the same questions and seeking the same things, was sobering. My book club discussion was somewhat frustrating in that people mostly talked about dementia cases they have observed and discussed how to prevent it (by good sleep hygiene, etc.).
Related: Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry, Still Alice by Lisa Genova, and Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante (a thriller). I was also reminded of Amy Bloom’s beautiful but sad memoir, In Love, about her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s and his choice to go to Dignitas to die....more
Crudo, “raw” in Italian, can refer to fish or meat platters (depicted on the original hardback cover). In this context, though, it connotes the raw maCrudo, “raw” in Italian, can refer to fish or meat platters (depicted on the original hardback cover). In this context, though, it connotes the raw material of a life: a messy matrix of choices and random happenings, rooted in a particular moment in time.
This is set over four and a bit months of 2017 and steeped in the protagonist’s detached horror at political and environmental breakdown. She’s just turned 40 and, in between two trips to New York City, has a vacation in Tuscany, dabbles in writing and art criticism, and settles into married life in London even though she’s used to independence and nomadism.
For as hyper-real as the contents are, Laing is doing something experimental, even fantastical – blending biography with autofiction and cultural commentary by making her main character, apparently, Kathy Acker. Never mind that Acker died of breast cancer in 1997.
I knew nothing of Acker but – while this is clearly born of deep admiration, as well as familiarity with her every written word – that didn’t matter. Acker quotes and Trump tweets are inserted verbatim, with the sources given in a “Something Borrowed” section at the end.
Like Jenny Offill’s Weather, this is a wry and all too relatable take on current events and the average person’s hypocrisy and sense of helplessness, with the lack of speech marks and shortage of punctuation I’ve come to expect from ultramodern novels:
she might as well continue with her small and cultivated life, pick the dahlias, stake the ones that had fallen down, she’d always known whatever it was wasn’t going to last for long.
40, not a bad run in the history of human existence but she’d really rather it all kept going, water in the taps, whales in the oceans, fruits and duvets, the whole sumptuous parade
This is how it is then, walking backwards into disaster, braying all the way.
I’ve somehow read almost all of Laing’s oeuvre (barring her essays, Funny Weather) and have found books like The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and Everybody wide-ranging and insightful. Crudo feels as faithful to life as Rachel Cusk’s autofiction or Deborah Levy’s autobiography, but also like an attempt to make something altogether new out of the stuff of our unprecedented times. No doubt some of the intertextuality of this, her only fiction to date, was lost on me, but I enjoyed it much more than I expected to – it’s funny as well as eminently quotable – and that’s always a win.
Today is Margaret Atwood’s 83rd birthday, so what better time to show her some love? Like the Beatles, she’s worked in so many different genres and stToday is Margaret Atwood’s 83rd birthday, so what better time to show her some love? Like the Beatles, she’s worked in so many different genres and styles that I don’t see how anyone could say they don’t like her – you just haven’t explored her oeuvre deeply enough. Although she’s best known for her fiction, she started off as a poet, with a whole five collections published in the 1960s before her first novel appeared. I’d previously read her Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965–1995 and Dearly, my top poetry read of 2020.
The Door was at that point her first poetry release in 12 years and features a number of the same themes that permeate her novels and nonfiction: memory, writing, ageing, travel and politics. I particularly like the early poems where she reinhabits memories of childhood and early adulthood, often through objects. Such artifacts are “pocketed as pure mementoes / of some once indelible day,” she writes in “Year of the Hen.”
These are followed by a trilogy about the death of the family’s pet cat, Blackie. “We get too sentimental / over dead animals. / We turn maudlin,” she acknowledges in “Mourning for Cats,” yet “Blackie in Antarctica” injects some humour as she remembers how her sister kept the cat’s corpse in the freezer until she could come home to bury it. Also on the lighter side is a long “where are they now?” update for the Owl and the Pussycat.
There are also meta reflections on poetry, slightly menacing observations on the weather (an implacable, fate-like force) and the seasons (autumn = hunting), virtual visits to the Arctic, mild complaints about the elderly not being taken seriously, and thoughts on duty.
Four in a row muse about war – the Vietnam War in particular, I think? “The Last Rational Man” is a sinister standout, depicting a figure who is doomed under Caligula’s reign. Whoever she may have had in mind when she wrote this, it’s just as relevant 15 years later.
In the final, title poem, which appears to be modelled on the Seven Ages of Man, a door is a metaphor for life’s transitions and, ultimately, for death.
The door swings open: O god of hinges, god of long voyages, you have kept faith. It’s dark in there. You confide yourself to the darkness. You step in. The door swings closed.
Apart from a few end rhymes, Atwood relies more on theme than on sonic technique or form. That, I think, makes her poetry accessible to those who are new to or suspicious of verse. Happy birthday, M.A., and thank you for your literary wisdom and innovation!
This reminded me of a cross between The Crow Road by Iain Banks and The Heavens by Sandra Newman, what with the teenage narrator and a vague time travThis reminded me of a cross between The Crow Road by Iain Banks and The Heavens by Sandra Newman, what with the teenage narrator and a vague time travel plot with some Shakespearean references. I put it on the pile for this challenge because I’d read it had a forest setting. I haven’t had much luck with Atkinson in the past and this didn’t keep me reading past page 60....more
