(3.5) Beautiful but inscrutable. The blurb says that ‘Even among Fleur Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculia(3.5) Beautiful but inscrutable. The blurb says that ‘Even among Fleur Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book’, which is the perfect way to describe it: if Jaeggy’s style always feels cool, The Water Statues is ice-cold, keeping the reader on the outside of the story, much as its protagonist Beeklam glimpses the lives of others through windows on a walk through Amsterdam. Yet it’s never smug, just uninterested in what you think of it. Occasionally, I couldn’t help but think (affectionately!) that it reads like what might be generated by an AI trained on Jaeggy’s work:
At times, toward evening, the monotony and tedium became almost unbearable, but I was pliant and yielded to what I supposed must be the order of the universe. It was as though smoke had curled his hair, and – thanks to the brutal simplicity that my mute companion was able to spread all around him – even someone who lived in dread of imminent catastrophe stopped thinking about it altogether.
First published in 1980, it’s not hard to see why it hasn’t been translated until now – it’s almost indescribable, though there are some odd, coincidental parallels to recent books: like the title character in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Beeklam lives in a large, flooded house filled with statues which he names; the story is ‘in part structured as a play’, but a lot of the dialogue comes in the form of detached monologues, which put me in mind of the statements in Olga Ravn’s The Employees.
Jaeggy talks a lot about the void, and this book is like the void as a novella. It gave me a dose of the distant, morbid clarity I expect from her writing, but I would not recommend it to anyone not already familiar with her style.
Aroon St Charles, unfortunate daughter of a declining aristocratic family, is a doubly unreliable narrator. She’s selective in what she chooses to relAroon St Charles, unfortunate daughter of a declining aristocratic family, is a doubly unreliable narrator. She’s selective in what she chooses to relate, and also ignorant of facts that are nevertheless plain to the reader (her brother’s relationship with his ‘best friend’, who poses as Aroon’s suitor to avoid suspicion; her father’s many affairs). As such it’s never really clear how much she actually knows. About Hubert and Richard she is pathetically oblivious, but the opening scene – in which she indirectly murders her mother by contriving to feed her rabbit – positions her as a schemer. What never wavers is the code of ‘good behaviour’, the adherence to mores and etiquette that comes above all else, including, and perhaps especially, happiness. A story that certainly puts the ‘dark’ in ‘darkly comic’; not a happy book but it does makes one glad, at least, not to be a St Charles....more
Reading a summary of Sleepwalking led me to expect a sort of 1980s Bunny: set (at first) on a college campus, it centres on a trio of poetry-and-suiciReading a summary of Sleepwalking led me to expect a sort of 1980s Bunny: set (at first) on a college campus, it centres on a trio of poetry-and-suicide-obsessed friends known as the ‘death girls’, and follows what happens when one of them, Claire, is drawn into a new relationship with quixotic Julian, whose personality is the opposite of this morbid clique. But it soon drifts away from all this – into the life and death of Lucy Ascher, the young poet whom Claire idolises, and a separate plot which follows Claire as she impulsively decides to approach Helen and Ray Ascher (Lucy’s parents) and work as their housekeeper. Each of the major characters is, in some way, ‘sleepwalking’ through life: Lucy is depressed; the Aschers are grieving; Claire is a combination of both, mourning her brother Seth and only finding comfort in Lucy Ascher’s cold, doomy poetry. Despite all this darkness – or maybe deliberately, to balance it out – the story is gentle in such abundance that it starts to border on fantasy. A whimsical and strange, yet also strangely likeable, blend of numbness and warmth....more
Süskind’s novella chronicles a couple of days in the life of Jonathan Noel, a Parisian security guard whose carefully ordered life begins to fray whenSüskind’s novella chronicles a couple of days in the life of Jonathan Noel, a Parisian security guard whose carefully ordered life begins to fray when he finds a pigeon standing outside his front door. Jonathan, we learn, ‘was not fond of events’. The appearance of the bird tips him over the edge – ‘in no circumstances could he live under the same roof with this pigeon, not a single day, not a single night, not a single hour’ – and this is just the beginning of an escalating series of personal horrors. There’s humour in the story, but it’s also a vivid, effective study of mounting anxiety and emotional insularity. And Jonathan’s paroxysm of internal rage after realising he’s ripped his trousers is the most relatable thing I’ve read in a while.
The debut novel from Bret Easton Ellis follows a group of wealthy, mostly interchangeable teenagers as they slide laconically between parties and barsThe debut novel from Bret Easton Ellis follows a group of wealthy, mostly interchangeable teenagers as they slide laconically between parties and bars and shopping sprees and bedrooms. It’s a raw version of the voice and themes crystallised in The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho. A series of passages in italics, scattered throughout the book, contain 18-year-old narrator Clay’s reflections on the previous summer; these are particularly amateurish, though there’s something charming in both the unpolished prose and the flashes of surprising vulnerability. If nothing else, Less Than Zero is an interesting cultural artefact, an embodiment of a particular zeitgeist. But it also struck me how much the overall effect reminded me, more than anything, of a bunch of online short stories I’ve read by various Gen Z writers – funny how styles come back around, or maybe the bored detachment of nihilistic teens just always stays the same.
Strangers has a high-concept premise, one that certainly grabbed my attention when I picked it up (this was a charity bookshop find, part of the same Strangers has a high-concept premise, one that certainly grabbed my attention when I picked it up (this was a charity bookshop find, part of the same batch as Cracks). The protagonist's parents died in an accident when he was just 12 years old. One day, he returns to the neighbourhood in which he grew up, and meets them there – unchanged. He is now 47; his parents – and there is no doubt they are his parents – are in their thirties.
It sounds like the starting point for a dark, terrifying descent into mania and doubt, or else a paranoiac thriller. However, Taichi Yamada takes a more subdued approach. The protagonist, Harada, has a quiet life: recently divorced, he rarely socialises and lives in a near-empty building. A secondary plot strand involves his burgeoning relationship with a neighbour, Kei, who shies away from the world because of the scars caused by a severe burn across her chest. Harada's encounters with his parents are disconcertingly ordinary. A note of horror creeps in when others notice Harada physically declining, though he is unable to see the change.
I was initially surprised that Strangers hadn't been made into a film. Upon digging deeper, I found that it has: the adaptation is called The Discarnates and was directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, who is best known for House. I'll have to seek it out at some point; I wonder why it isn't better known, as the concept and structure lend themselves so perfectly to visual interpretation that it's easy to picture a screen version. Which is hardly surprising given Taichi Yamada's background as a film and TV scriptwriter.
I really enjoyed the haunting mood of Strangers. It somehow maintains a calm tone at the same time as feeling quite fast-paced, and the climactic moments are especially great. A psychological ghost story that's both chilling and unexpectedly comforting.
Ian Laidlaw is a professor of politics at a Scottish university. In his own words, he is 'a quiet man, a deliberate man. I think before I speak and I Ian Laidlaw is a professor of politics at a Scottish university. In his own words, he is 'a quiet man, a deliberate man. I think before I speak and I don't speak often.' His staid marriage to a meek woman ended when she met someone else, and he has been alone ever since. His view of himself is shaped almost entirely by one thing: his facial scars. Having been attacked by a dog as a child, he has significant scarring on one side of his face. We only have Ian's word for how bad the damage is, and he certainly wants us to know it's bad: 'repellent', 'vile', 'a monster'. 'Nobody treats a man as disfigured as I am as if he were human.'
The book opens with a seemingly innocuous incident. During a tutorial, one of Ian's students, Alicia Davie, laughs at him. The cause is seemingly his repeated use of the phrase 'quite so'. One might imagine that Ian would see this mockery as another example of his otherness, more evidence that the world sees him as less than human. Instead, he feels unexpectedly delighted. 'She'd made me feel not just good but real.' He becomes obsessed with Alicia, and soon devises a reason to invite her to his flat. This strange entanglement develops into an affair, and the affair turns into a sadomasochistic relationship.
The generational schism between Ian, born before the start of the Second World War, and Alicia, a child of the 1960s, is immense. 'Difference in age,' says Ian, 'is the most significant of inequalities.' The students of the 1980s are 'a new species entirely', 'reared by revolutionaries'. When Ian first sees Alicia's messy student lodgings, his disgust verges on hysterical – 'I felt more than simply upset, I felt sickened'. When Alicia asks where Ian got his scars, he tells her 'Passchendaele', and (in his assessment) she believes him. He is ashamed of his involvement with her, ashamed of her poor manners and bad habits, her ignorance and indolence; but he is also sexually obsessed. There's a lot of sex in this book, yet much of it is described in vague, evasive terms. This makes perfect sense: the priggish Ian would of course find it abhorrent to talk in detail about what he does in bed. It also underscores the more sinister aspects of the novel, obscuring the truth.
For it is clear almost immediately that Ian's narrative is a confession. In the first chapter, he ominously refers to 'what you saw up in my flat', and he is, as occasional asides prove, speaking to a police officer. He takes his time in the telling, the better for Fine to elucidate his character. This is a man who thinks he knows other people, and indeed himself, far better than he truly does. With precious little experience of relationships (of any kind), he fancies himself an expert on human behaviour. In a different story, this naivety might be poignant. Not here, for 'the killjoy' is a truly monstrous creation. Alicia, meanwhile, has no voice in Ian's account, remaining as enigmatic to the reader as she is to him, and subject to his (likely highly inaccurate) assumptions.
As with many such unreliable narratives, the question of what has been left out – and it seems certain much has, since parts of Ian's story make little sense otherwise – chills the blood. I raced through the second half of the book in a rhapsody of terror. I felt like I was driving a car at high speed towards a brick wall.
Many years ago, Fine's YA thriller The Tulip Touch was one of my childhood favourites. I didn't read this book because of that, though; I didn't even know she had written any adult novels until I chanced across a copy of this in a second-hand bookshop. The Tulip Touch entranced 12-year-old me because it was exquisitely horrible, at times quite terrifying (I have often thought that it was instrumental in forming my reading preferences), and The Killjoy had much the same effect on me as an adult. It's an exhilarating, awful story, told in riveting style.
This is the third Barbara Vine book I've read (after Asta’s Book and The Minotaur), and I love the richness of her stories. I've definitely said tThis is the third Barbara Vine book I've read (after Asta’s Book and The Minotaur), and I love the richness of her stories. I've definitely said this about other books, but A Fatal Inversion strikes me as such an old-fashioned mystery – slow-moving, painstakingly detailed. It really made me think about how quickly our (readers' in general) perceptions of genre shift; I struggle to imagine this being published under the banner of 'psychological thriller' or even 'crime' these days; too many scenes that drag and meander, too much about the stuffy lives of upper-middle-class Brits. Yet those were the things I liked most about it.
The plot is of a type that sounds unoriginal now, but doubtless was more of a novelty when A Fatal Inversion was published: the 'group of hedonistic young people inhabiting an old country house' setup. It's the unusually hot summer of 1976, and 19-year-old Adam Verne-Smith has inherited his great-uncle Hilbert's mansion, Wyvis Hall – much to the chagrin of his father, who had been toadying to Hilbert for years in the hope of securing the house. (This is the sort of detail A Fatal Inversion has in spades. There are pages and pages devoted to this family spat, which has nothing much to do with the main plot, but adds fascinating texture to the characters.) On a whim, Adam decides to stay at the Hall over the summer with his friend Rufus. They are eventually joined by a hippyish couple, Shiva and Vivien, and a strange girl named Zosie, whom Adam falls in love/lust with. Ten years later, things are very different: the former friends have sworn never to speak again, and think of the house with horror, guilt and fear.
We have an idea of why, because in the opening scene, the couple now inhabiting Wyvis Hall uncover a human skeleton while burying their dog in what is ostensibly a pet graveyard. We learn early on that the body was a woman's, so the story is necessarily told from Adam, Rufus and Shiva's perspectives; Vine must keep us in the dark about what becomes of Vivien, Zosie and a handful of incidental female characters. This is the weakest aspect of A Fatal Inversion, as the narrative sometimes ties itself in knots trying to explain why none of the men will countenance the idea of contacting [unspecified female character]. Nonetheless, the story overall retains its strange fascination.
The characters are an awful lot; even the nicest of them are no more than vaguely likeable. Most are either downright obnoxious (the men) or annoying (the women). And yet the way Vine writes them is so persuasive that I wanted them to get away with it! The scenes of that summer at Wyvis Hall – dubbed 'Ecalpemos' ('someplace' in reverse) by Adam – are peculiar and hazy, befitting the status this short period of time holds in the characters' minds. Vine depicts the power of memories with stunning precision: there are several fantastic moments in which a scene is suddenly interrupted, the perspective snaps back to reality, and we realise that what we have been reading is an individual's recollection, not objective fact.
It often seems like nothing much is happening in A Fatal Inversion, or things are moving too slowly, or the story is looping back on itself. The writing is so good, though, that I was happy to go along with whatever it was describing, even if it (seemingly) did nothing to advance the plot. This slow-burn approach also makes it all the more effective when a twist or revelation does come. The ending is delightfully satisfying, too, with a little sting in its tail.
'Never mind,' I told myself, 'it's only a nightmare.' But then I remembered that I'd never gone to bed that night, and so it couldn't possibly be a ni'Never mind,' I told myself, 'it's only a nightmare.' But then I remembered that I'd never gone to bed that night, and so it couldn't possibly be a nightmare.
Knowing nothing at all about Leonora Carrington’s writing, I came to this with no preconceptions. I found a set of playful and weird folk tales that often made me smile at some strange mental image.
'White Rabbits' is a vivid and bloody piece of horror that makes a perfect opening. The narrator is drawn into the weird world of her opposite neighbour, who keeps a pack of carnivorous rabbits.
In 'Uncle Sam Carrington', a little girl sets off in search of an unconventional way to solve the problem of her embarrassing aunt and uncle. On her journey she meets fighting vegetables, a talking horse and a pair of witches.
'The Debutante' is the memorable tale of a spoiled debutante who, tired of attending balls thrown in her honour, sends a hyena in her place. You can probably guess how well that turns out.
'The Oval Lady' is like a bizarre dream – or, indeed, one of Carrington's paintings come to life. The same might be said of 'The Seventh Horse', and these two stories come the closest to feeling like Carrington is writing nonsense for the sake of it. There are still striking images and lines to be found in them, however.
'My Flannel Knickers' has a brilliant beginning: 'Thousands of people know my flannel knickers, and though I know this may seem flirtatious, it is not. I am a saint.' It's a dark fable about vanity and social ambition.
'The Skeleton's Holiday' was originally published as part of a collaborative novel, The Man Who Lost His Skeleton, with a group of other surrealist artists. Written in 1939, it is considerably older than the other stories collected here, all of which were first published in 1988. It doesn't make an awful lot of sense in isolation (though I'm willing to bet it doesn't make much more sense in context).
A solid three stars for me. If the concept – a humanoid lizard-like creature escapes from a research institute, is taken in by a bored housewife, and A solid three stars for me. If the concept – a humanoid lizard-like creature escapes from a research institute, is taken in by a bored housewife, and they begin an affair – is outlandish, the approach is pedestrian as can be. That's not to say the writing is without merit: it's efficient and clear and oddly convincing. However, Dorothy's deadening marriage and suburban neighbourhood seem so old-fashioned it's difficult to believe this wasn't written two or three decades earlier than 1982. The most intriguing thing about the whole story – Dorothy 'hearing things on the programmes that couldn't possibly be real' – is never mentioned again once 'Larry' appears.
(I was originally going to read the further tales included in the volume Mrs Caliban and Other Stories, but the first of them, 'I See a Long Journey', almost sent me to sleep.)
Ever find yourself entirely unable to describe or explain something you enjoyed reading/watching/consuming? The Trick is to Keep Breathing fits right Ever find yourself entirely unable to describe or explain something you enjoyed reading/watching/consuming? The Trick is to Keep Breathing fits right into that category. Maybe some novels are just not meant to be reviewed. Stories are sometimes most memorable for the ways they make you feel. Charting the breakdown of a young teacher (the ironically-monikered Joy) in the wake of her partner's death, it dabbles in formal experimentation – a review quoted on the cover of my 1997 paperback copy describes it as 'Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath'. There's a surprising lightness to it, and this weird self-contained mood I've come across before in 80s and 90s fiction – maybe it's something to do with Joy's life being so recognisable in many ways, except for the absence of the internet and mobile phones, the world feeling smaller then, communities being more tangible then? Or it might be the in-a-bubble sensation of existing inside Joy's head, the drifting numbness of grief and depression. Sometimes it has the air of a particularly twisted fairytale. I can't tell you how I felt or feel about it in the end. Galloway is a magnificent chronicler of mental deterioration.
Oh, poor Kitty Maule. I don't know how on earth I came to read an Anita Brookner novel with the expectation that there might really be a happy ending,Oh, poor Kitty Maule. I don't know how on earth I came to read an Anita Brookner novel with the expectation that there might really be a happy ending, but Providence manipulates the reader's emotions so effectively that I read much of it with my heart in my mouth, hoping against hope for an at least mildly positive outcome. The final third unfolds with an almost unbearable sense of high-wire tension that rivals the finest thrillers.
Like Ruth in A Start in Life, one might say of Kitty that her 'life has been ruined by literature'. Like Frances in Look At Me, she makes horrified judgements of others that reflect her own fears far more than the reality of these people's lives. Some of the blurbs for Providence refer to it as a romantic comedy, but romantic tragedy is more like it – Kitty and her beloved both believe in divine providence of a sort, but unbeknownst to Kitty she is on a very different path to the carelessly handsome and popular Maurice Bishop.
And the infuriating Miss Fairchild! How perfectly she seems to embody that odd word 'limpid' – both its true meaning of beautiful clarity and its inevitable negative associations and somewhat ugly sound.
As with all Brookner's writing, certain passages leapt out at me with an emotional vividity that made me think 'nobody writes like this anymore' – yet her novels aren't particularly old (this one's from 1982) and I can't really think of anyone, from any era, who writes quite like Brookner.
p59: 'I do not want to be trustworthy, and safe, and discreet. I do not want to be the one who understands and sympathizes and soothes. I do not want to be reliable... I want to be totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful. I want to be part of a real family. I want my father to be there and to shoot things. I do not want my grandmother to tell me what to wear. I want to wear jeans and old sweaters belonging to my brother whom of course I do not have.'
p66: 'Kitty felt a sort of irritated languor, very different from her usual state of calm if timid determination. Although she looked on Caroline's activities sternly, she wondered with genuine humility if she could ever be such a woman, delighting in her own appearance, devoting much time and effort to embellishing it, regarding her small outing as a genuine point of reference in the day, fascinated by her ultimate fate and waiting for others to bring it about. Kitty had frequently felt that she lacked some essential feminine quality, that this resided in the folklore passed on by women who possessed a knowledge that she was forced to supplement by reading books.'
p72: 'I must grow up, she thought. I must stop being so humble. I can make decisions and initiate actions like anyone else. I am not stupid. I am not poor. If I want to do something I do not have to wait for permission. I am old enough to make up my own mind. My mother was a widow at eighteen. My father was a corpse at twenty-one. I am wasting time. I shall waste no more.'
p88: 'Oh, I am misbegotten, she thought. I am not anywhere at home. I believe in nothing. I am truly in an existentialist world. There are no valid prophecies.'
A weirdly hypnotic tragicomedy of the banal; I can easily imagine it as a stage play – perhaps it might pass for something by Coward or Wilde. The plaA weirdly hypnotic tragicomedy of the banal; I can easily imagine it as a stage play – perhaps it might pass for something by Coward or Wilde. The players are Ruth, a naive and bookish young woman; her parents, spoilt actress Helen and feckless bookseller George; and Mrs Cutler, the Weiss family's waspish, chainsmoking housekeeper.
Dr Ruth Weiss is first introduced to us as a forty-year-old academic (and spinster), but the majority of the story is about her adolescence and early adulthood. From a young age, Ruth, neglected by her self-involved parents, loses herself in books. Romance obsesses yet eludes her: there is one evening with Richard, a young man who is widely considered beautiful but has 'an ulcer' which necessitates the cooking of exceptionally bland dishes. So disastrous is this evening that Ruth is compelled to move out of her flat. With her sole romantic prospect extinguished, Ruth goes to Paris and stays in the miserable servants' quarters of an elderly couple, friends of her parents. Throughout, Ruth, a devotee of Balzac, wrestles with the ideas of vice and virtue. As in Brookner's Look At Me, the time period is indistinct, with some details that feel incredibly dated and others alarmingly modern.
Ruth is the protagonist, but – and this I didn't expect – we learn a lot about the interior lives of the others too. George has an affair with a motherly employee, in whose flat (to her mounting frustration) he installs expensive contraptions he has bought himself from department stores: record player, sun lamp, portable grill, Teasmade. Helen becomes a recluse and wastes away, mourning the loss of her career, looks and social influence. Mrs Cutler resolves to marry again late in life, doing so via a 'marriage bureau'. Brookner has a gift for precise, startling description: the furniture Ruth's grandmother brings over from Berlin, 'in dark woods which looked as though they had absorbed the blood of horses'; the late scene in which the remarried Mrs Cutler appears at the Weiss home, resplendently vulgar in 'a fun fur coat and high-heeled boots'.
The solitudinous world that Brookner's heroines inhabit is so seductive to me, even when I understand it is not intended to be so. Or perhaps it's simply that she makes home and family life look so hellish that it's difficult not to see wandering the streets alone as an idyllic respite. Poor Ruth gets little more than an ironic final sentence as compensation for her depressing 'start in life', one which sadly brings her back where she began.
That opening sentence, of course: 'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'
p8: 'Her appearance and character were exactly half-way between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she was scrupulous, passionate, thoughtful, and given to self-analysis, but her colleagues thought her merely scrupulous, noting her neatness with approval, and assuming that her absent and slightly haggard expression denoted a tricky passage in Balzac. In fact she was extreme in her expectations and although those expectations had never been fulfilled she had learnt nothing.'
p16: 'Their great strength, had she but known it, was that they were able to voice every passing anxiety. This process, which sounded like a litany of hardship, was in fact an alleviation of disappointment. The child registered only their disappointment, and felt apologetic about her presence which somehow marred the hectic honeymoon presence which they sought to prolong.'
p22: 'Adolescence? It was hardly an adolescence as other girls knew it, waking up to their temporary but so exhilarating power over men. No slow smiles, no experimental flaunting, no assumed mystery for Ruth. She was in no hurry to enter the adult world, knowing in advance, and she was not wrong, that she was badly equipped for being there. In any event it seemed unattractive and nothing to do with her.'
p23: 'Tell me, Ruth,' she said, as they emerged from the bus at the other end of their journey. 'Do you understand everything you read? Does it ever worry you?' 'Yes,' said Ruth, to both questions.'
p75: 'An urge to stay all day in the divine air of late September was like a physical quickening of her blood. Almost, she was happy. Or perhaps she recognised that this was how happiness felt. All one needed was a pretext. If there were no pretext, one needed an analogue. But Ruth, walking endlessly, was content to experience the unlooked for exhilaration, to hope, to beg, that one day, some day, she might find a reason for feeling as she did, buoyant, serene, anaesthetised against everyday hurts. She imagined, wrongly, that being in love was like this. With love comes seriousness, loss of autonomy, responsibility without power.'
p94: 'A great desire for change came over Ruth and a great uncertainty as to how this might be brought about. For she knew, obscurely, that she had capacities as yet untried but that they might be for ever walled up unless her circumstances changed.'
p99: 'She perceived that most tales of morality were wrong, that even Charles Dickens was wrong, and that the world is not won by virtue. Eternal life, perhaps – but who knows about that? Not the world.'
p131: 'She sat down on the edge of the bath, trembling. Could this still happen? Could this abortive, unfinished business disturb her so profoundly? Would she always react the same way to those who did not want her, trying ever more hopelessly to please, while others, better disposed, went off unregarded?'...more
Frances Hinton is an introspective woman, 'loyal and well-behaved and uncritical', with aspirations to become a successful writer. She works in a mediFrances Hinton is an introspective woman, 'loyal and well-behaved and uncritical', with aspirations to become a successful writer. She works in a medical research library where she studies her colleagues and makes notes for short stories, perhaps a novel. Her mother has recently passed away, and every evening she returns to a vast, outdated Maida Vale flat where she is attended by the ageing family maid, Nancy. Of indeterminate age herself – she seems to feel both young and old – Frances is chronically lonely, constantly battling to convince herself that she is content, or at least that her stark existence is a choice.
Fortunately, I am not a hysterical person. I am used to being on my own and sometimes I doubt whether I could endure a lot of excitement. This remains an academic question, for I have never yet been tempted in this way. I am very orderly, and Spartan in my habits. I am famous for my control, which has seen me through many crises. By a supreme irony, my control is so great that these crises remain unknown to the rest of the world, and so I am thought to be unfeeling. And of course I never speak of them. That would be intolerable. If I ever suffer loneliness it is because I have settled for the harsh destiny of dealing with these matters by myself.
Until, that is, a carelessly glamorous couple, Dr Nick Fraser and his wife Alix, take an interest in her and involve her in their social life. (Said social life sounds rather dull – they're either going to the same restaurant night after night or watching films at home – but as far as Frances is concerned, she's hit the jackpot.) Alix in particular treats Frances like a child might treat a pet, displaying her to friends, openly mocking her in supposedly affectionate fashion, and forgetting her altogether when she's bored. But it is through her association (one can hardly call it friendship) with the Frasers that Frances meets James Anstey, and the love she has longed for seems, at last, a real possibility.
Naturally, that's not the end of it, but it wouldn't even matter if it was, for Look At Me is, regardless of its plot, at its strongest as a detailed analysis of the fascinating, tragic, endlessly quotable Frances. Her sensitivity is fathomless, yet her forced detachment verges on inhuman. She describes herself as an 'observer' seven times, and by the closing chapters she has reached the point of describing herself in third person. Despite her own situation, she is moved to horror by the loneliness of others, showing little sympathy. 'I hated every reminder that the world was old and shaky... that everyone was, more or less, dying.' In one particularly revealing scene she describes the effect of having seen a group of people in a launderette on Christmas Day. Imagining they have nowhere else to go to find companionship (though there is no evidence that this is really the case), she is aghast, and tells us so in the most melodramatic terms:
[I] saw inside the steamy window three men and one woman, quite well-dressed, reduced to spending their day like this, and finding what company the desperation of others afforded them. I never wanted to see that again... The day was ruined. I could not wait for Nancy to retire to her television, and I even went to my mother's bathroom cabinet and took two of her sleeping pills from the bottle. I did not need them; I simply wanted to kill the day.
Instead, she seeks the company of gilded extroverts like the Frasers – as though their personalities will rub off on her without any effort being made on her part; as though the isolation and dullness of fellow outcasts (such as former library employee Mrs Morpeth, who she visits monthly out of a sense of duty she can never quite banish) might, too, be catching. 'I do not seek out friends so that they will offer consolation: I have a horror of that.' Inevitably, she is an unreliable narrator, and even as Look At Me delves so astutely into Frances' inner life, some details remain obscure. Surrounding her obsession with the Frasers and James is the spectre of what she implies was a devastating love affair. She refers to it repeatedly as 'the time of which I never speak' – a falsehood, as she often narrates its effect on her, but the circumstances are never properly revealed.
As Alix seems cruel and dismissive towards Frances from her first appearance, it's painful to keep reading about the self-abasement Frances engages in to keep hold of her 'friendship'. Yet when Alix rhetorically asks Frances 'it's all self with you, isn't it?' it's hard not to agree. The title, 'look at me', is her constant internal refrain, both a cry for help and an infantile demand for attention. She maintains that she does not love James even as she builds an imagined future around him; insists that she doesn't mind, even likes, Alix's patronising habit of calling her 'Little Orphan Fanny', despite the fact that on the very first page of the book she baldly states 'I do not like to be called Fanny'; tries to play down her adoration of the Frasers by claiming that the time she spends with them is all simply research for her fiction.
There are indicators that the novel is set in the era of its publication, the early 1980s, but they are few and far between: a passing reference to 'horrible shops' selling, among other things, 'video cassettes' is one of the only clues. Otherwise, it could be set in the early 1930s or mid-1950s, and the book it most reminded me of was Claude Houghton's I Am Jonathan Scrivener (1930). It, too, concerns a character who has accepted his lot as a lonely, quiet observer, only to find his life transformed when he is inducted into a circle of glamorous friends. Frances, however, lacks the often comic voice of Houghton's narrator (although there are some moments of dry humour – and I found it interesting that she so often insists her own stories are very funny).
Frances is also a clear precursor to the eponymous antiheroine of Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen, and has a similar effect on the reader – she is both heartbreaking and maddening. Like Eileen, Frances wants others to really SEE her, yet does nothing to make this happen; like Eileen, Frances is frustrating and offputting, yet I think many readers will recognise parts of themselves in her. Frances is nowhere near as candid or, frankly, as scatological as Eileen, but the two characters talk so nakedly of their own unhappiness, inner turmoil and longing for more that at some points they could be speaking with one voice. Where Eileen has her inscrutable 'death mask', Frances has her manners:
The trouble with good manners is that people are persuaded that you are all right, require no protection, are perfectly capable of looking after yourself. And some people take your impassivity as a calculated insult, as Alix seemed to be doing now. Still I smiled.
I found Look At Me so devastatingly incisive about loneliness, longing, having an acute awareness of how others see you, and the exquisite pain of dashed hope. It certainly won't be my last Brookner....more
The unique idea at the heart of this story is instantly intriguing. Mark-Alem, scion of the powerful Quprili family, is given a job at a prestigious iThe unique idea at the heart of this story is instantly intriguing. Mark-Alem, scion of the powerful Quprili family, is given a job at a prestigious institution: the Tabir Sarrail, or Palace of Dreams. Transcriptions of citizens' dreams are collected here in their thousands, then pored over, analysed and interpreted for indications that they contain some divine prediction, a message of glory (or doom) for the Empire. The eventual aim of this mammoth task is to identify the 'Master-Dream', the most meaningful and portentous of them all, which is delivered to the Sultan on a weekly basis.
Unsurprisingly, the novel has often been compared to the works of Orwell and Kafka. Mark-Alem's job is bureaucratic yet bizarre, and cloaked in so much mystery that at first, he doesn't even know what he's supposed to be doing, or the way around the vast Palace, or what all the oddly-named departments do. There are recurring scenes in which he wanders the corridors, lost and disorientated. Parallels are drawn between being swallowed up by this place and the experience of sleep - or even death. Having become accustomed to its strange ways, Mark-Alem finds real life comparatively insipid: 'the whole world seemed to have lost all its colour, as if after a long illness... How tedious, grasping and confined this world seemed in comparison with the one he now served!' Yet when he's at work, the dream transcripts often seem incomprehensible to him. At times he marks them at random, and it's this cavalier approach to the task that ultimately brings about the plot's bloody climax. Its meaning as a political allegory is clear, but the novel is always equally enjoyable as an imaginative (often quite suspenseful) story.
Had this been a smoother read, my rating would be higher, as I really liked the story. However, I thought it had a stilted and awkward feel all the way through, and I'm convinced this can only be the result of it having been translated twice - this English version is not translated directly from the original Albanian, but from the the French edition. There were a couple of unusual recurring phrases that really jarred, and seemed like inaccurate choices; certain words were repeated with irritating frequency. I found all of this really offputting and I'm afraid it also makes me less likely to read more Kadare (though I'd first need to establish whether all of them have been through the weird Albanian-French-English treatment)....more
Now that I've read everything by Nina Allan (to date), I've decided it's about time I started reading more work by her partner, Christopher Priest. I Now that I've read everything by Nina Allan (to date), I've decided it's about time I started reading more work by her partner, Christopher Priest. I have no idea whether The Affirmation is a good place to start, but it certainly feels like it. This is an eerie novel which flips seamlessly between real and imagined worlds (but which is which?) while constructing a clever, intricate web of details around a doubled central character.
29-year-old Peter Sinclair has recently been through great personal upheaval, involving the death of his father, a tempestuous breakup, and the loss of his job and, subsequently, his flat. Therefore he has no qualms about moving out of London and into a dilapidated cottage belonging to a friend of his father's. The idea is that he will temporarily live there and, in lieu of rent, decorate the place. However, once there, he becomes obsessed with a different task: writing down the story of his life. At first he tries to write a straightforward memoir, but this doesn't help him make sense of anything. Eventually, he realises there is only one way to approach it: 'the deeper truth could only be told by falsehood'.
In this manuscript, the second Peter lives in a place he has invented – Jethra, a city in Faiandland. (These locations are part of the Dream Archipelago, which appears in a number of Priest's novels.) He has won an unusual lottery: the prize is immortality, conveyed by means of a treatment known as athanasia, which he must now travel to the island of Collago to receive. This all makes a kind of sense until we discover Jethra-Peter is also writing a fictionalised account of his life – in which he has invented a city called London and which describes, in every detail, all that we know of original-Peter's life. Not only that, but this manuscript is crucial to the athanasia process.
The Affirmation is written in a style I would describe as smooth. At first, it is deceptively mundane. But, even before the Jethra narrative enters the frame, there is also something quite unnerving about it. The first few chapters in particular reminded me of Frederick in John Fowles' The Collector, except that we are never allowed outside Peter's narrow, twisted viewpoint. The one exception to that is an intervention from original-Peter's sister Felicity; through her words, we realise his perception bears very little resemblance to the truth. The cottage is a dump, and what Peter has told us about his ex-girlfriend Gracia is a pack of lies. However, this small window on reality is soon swallowed up by Peter's imagined lives.
The reader, then, is doubly unsure who or what to believe, and this only becomes more difficult as the two narratives bleed into each other more and more. If it was possible for a book to make me feel physically dizzy, this one would. The two Peters are like the two sides – or one side? – of a Möbius strip, and each explains the other, so (arguably, anyway) you can't believe one is invented without believing the other one is too. (A comment on fiction in itself, maybe. If The Affirmation was published today, it would surely be considered a playful take on the 'literary vs. science fiction' debate.) It's a strange experiment that actually comes off. And what makes it work is that it is also just a really good, really enjoyable story.
