Eve's Alexandria

Les faits divers

Lille, Beard

On January 16, a woman about twenty-five years old dreams that she has grown a long brown beard. Shamefacedly she takes the train to Lille, where she goes directly to a Turkish bath. Her beard floats in the warm water like a dead animal. She shaves it off with a knife, but gashes her face; she stares at her bloody jaw in the mirror.

She wakes up entirely naked in a bed not her own and murmurs, "Lille?"

Time for another short post on a short book - The Facts of Winter (2005) by Paul La Farge - just exactly as its theme becomes out-of-season. I'm so very behind on posting about my reading. Anyway, this is a slim but beautifully-produced volume from McSweeney's, whose conceit is that it is a parallel-text edition and translation of a 1904 work by a little-known French author, Paul Poissel. It takes the form of a series of vignettes, describing the dreams of people living, as the Author's Note puts it "in and around Paris during the winter of 1881, which is to say that it is a fictional account of the imaginary lives of people who may or may not be real, and who in any case lived a quarter of a century before the book was written".

Yes, he's playing meta games, and they're (inevitably) a bit tedious, but on balance the book's quirky charm - and my longstanding fondness for flash fiction done well - won me over.

The French title, Les faits d'hiver, is a pun on les faits divers, the name given to (very) short 'human interest stories' as reported in French newspapers. Perhaps the best way to explain this phenomenon, and La Farge's book, is to point you towards a piece in the London Review of Books, about Félix Fénéon's Nouvelles en trois lignes. The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's the most relevant bit:

In 1906, Fénéon worked for the newspaper Le Matin, and for some months was assigned to compose the faits divers column – known in hackdom as chiens écrasés (‘run-over dogs’). He had at his disposal the wire services, local and provincial newspapers, and communications from readers. He composed up to twenty of these three-line fillers in the course of his evening shift. They were printed – unsigned, of course – and read for a quick smile or breath-intake or head-shake, and then forgotten.

Whether there is a direct debt to Fénéon and his three-line faits (which were published as a collection, unofficially and without Fénéon's consent, after his death), I have no idea, but the brevity, the delight in eccentricity, and the often quite morbid humour of Fénéon is shared by La Farge.

There is also a persistent note of surrealism. Some, like the one at the top of this post, are overtly fantastical; others feel rather more slice-of-life, exploring ordinary people's personal, social and professional anxieties through pleasingly daft exaggeration (exactly, of course, as dreams do):

The Patricide

On February 17, a widow in Mulhouse dreams that she is hungry for a husband. "I want a husband," she tells her son. "Go out and get me a husband." Her son goes out and comes back several hours later with a chair. "This is all I could find," he says. "Idiot," says the widow. "How am I supposed to marry a chair?" But she is so hungry for a husband that she marries the chair. Her marriage is unhappy and she reproaches her son constantly. "Good-for-nothing!" she says. "If I have a husband who doesn't love me, it's your fault." The son finds this situation unbearable. He raises the chair over his head and breaks it into pieces. "Look what you've done!" cries the widow. "Now you're a patricide!"

And then there's my particular favourite, a little gem of self-contained silliness:

Attack of a Train

Mr Riquemale, the commissioner of police of La Ciotat, dreams on March 13 that a band of Italians are gesticulating in his office. Using their arms as semaphores, the Italians explain to him that the train from Marseilles is in a tunnel near Cassis, and it doesn't want to come out. Mr Riquemale visits the scene of the problem: indeed, there's the Marseilles train in the tunnel. "Come out of there!" he says. The train doesn't answer. The Italians, who have followed him, gesticulate in a way that means he mustn't provoke the train, or else, like a trapped animal, it will attack. Mr Riquemale doesn't give a damn what a bunch of Italians who can't speak French might or might not think. "Are you coming out?" he asks the train. "Or am I coming in to get you?" The train doesn't answer. "All right," says Mr Riquemale. "Then I'm going in." He goes into the tunnel, followed by the Italians who go No, no, with their arms. The train attacks.

~~Nic

A Sporting Interlude

I'm afraid this is not a post about books.  It is a post about women's sport.  More specifically, it is a short rant about media coverage of women's rugby, published via the best means I have.  Bear with me.

If you live in the UK and watch weekend sport you can hardly have missed the final matches of the Six Nations Rugby tournament this Saturday.  Now, I admit that watching sport isn't my thing, but of all the televised sports on offer rugby is the one I can most happily tolerate.  I think it's the combination of brute force and polite fortitude.  When you're knocked down in rugby (that would be every 20 seconds or so) you get back up again, sometimes with blood pouring from your head and you play on.  England's men's team didn't win this year - we came second, just - but the last three matches shared 6 hours of screen time nevertheless.

England's women's team did win their Six Nations tournament, which plays simultaneously.  They won decisively, for the fourth year running.  At a time when English sport is in the doldrums you would think this was worth celebrating.  How much televised coverage do you suppose our victory received?  None.  None at all.  Even the RBS Six Nations own official website doesn't seem to care about the result - they haven't even announced the winner yet, although the deciding match was played yesterday.  The Guardian's coverage is currently non-existent;  if you scroll down the BBC's Rugby page, past the two dozen stories about the men's competition, you will find a tiny sidebar with four headlines, sans photographs, in the bottom right hand corner.

This is symptomatic of women's sports coverage in this country.  Quite simply, there isn't any.  Did you know, for example, that we have the best women's cricket team in the world and just won our World Cup final tie with New Zealand?  Unless you read The Times cricket coverage you probably don't.  Recently our local news ran a report about an advocacy scheme to interest girls in sport. Can you guess which sport they highlighted?  Trampolining.  Yes, trampolining.  This is not to malign the fitness and skill of trampoliners, but what a blatant piece of stereotyping!  Sexism is clearly alive and well in this corner of the media at least.

So, if no one else will say it: Congratulations to the English Women's Six Nations team (and Cricket team too). May you go on to win another four Six Nations. Perhaps next time the BBC can find 15 minutes out of their busy, sexist schedule for you.

~~Victoria~~

The Orange Prize Longlist, 2009

Almost immediately after I read Nic's post on the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist, I received an email about the Orange Prize longlist announcement.  Two prize announcements in one day.  It's almost too much for my list-addicted brain to cope with.  If I had the time I'd read everything on both I absolutely would, but unfortunately I don't and I can't.  I'll have to content myself with just the Orange shortlist (as usual), which will be announced on 21st April, and a few of the longlisted titles in between now and then.  The list has me excited again this year, a) because there is a glut of historical fiction on it, b) because there are half a dozen books and names I've never heard of, and c) because I've forgotten what a pain reading it can be.   Here is my take on it thus far. Books I already have are in bold, books I have on hold at the library are in italics.

  Debra Adelaide The Household Guide to Dying  (HarperCollins)

The first book on the list is the one I'm least interested in. This is not really the book's fault, since I have nothing on which to judge it apart from the synopsis I've read online, the cover and the news that Debra Adelaide earnt a $1 million dollar advance for it.  What puts me off almost instantly is how typical of the Orange Prize it is: a mother dying from cancer decides to write a household guide to dying for herself and for her daughters, which forces her to confront her own past in the process.  Mother, daughters, love, grief, memory, the household - could it better fit the Orange mould of what women's writing is? I doubt it.  One reviewer describes it as Six Feet Under meets Desperate Housewives, which sounds like the most unholy union imaginable and dangerously like this year's Lottery.

  Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress (Tindal Street Press)

I have heard such mixed reviews of this novel that I must, must, must read it for myself.  (You may remember that it was longlisted for the Booker Prize last year, much to the credit of Tindal Street Press, and became something of a hot-topic around the blogs.) It is the first of four historical novels on the list.  Set in the mid-late 19th century it is a part biographical, mostly fictional take of the marriage of Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens. The main characters have different names - Dickens becomes Alfred Gibson and Catherine is Dorothea - but the contours of the real couple's life are the same.   I'll be picking it up from the library later today.  Incidentally, I'm not sure about the cover.  Looks a bit amateurish to me.

Lissa Evans Their Finest Hour and a Half (Doubleday)

The second historical novel on the longlist is set in 1940s London, and focuses on a female copywriter commissioned to script a patriotic film about Dunkirk.  It sounds like good fun, and I love the stylised cover. If the library had it, I'd be reserving it, but alas they're slow off the mark and copies are still on order.

Bernadine Evaristo Blonde Roots (Hamish Hamilton)

I love historical fiction, and I often love alternate historical fiction better still.  Bernadine Evaristo's latest novel has a simple premise: black Africans enslaved white Europeans and set them to work in the fields of America rather than the other way round.  The novel explores what this might mean for the course of our history through the eyes of Doris, a white slave girl who works her way to freedom. The book has been generally well-reviewed as a clever piece of satire.  Will it prove more than that? The extracts I've read promise interesting but the writing is a little...clunky.

  Ellen Feldman Scottsboro (Picador)

This is the third historical novel on the list and the first that I'd never heard of.  To my surprise the York Library system was there before me and had two copies in stock.  It takes us back to Jim Crow's South in 1931 and dramatises the apparently infamous Scottsboro case in which 8 black men are sentenced to death for the alleged rapes of two white prostitutes.  The case is covered by journalist Alice Whittier for the liberal New York New Order, the only woman on the case she has a unique perspective of the crime and its victims.  Sounds good, yes?  I have seen it described as both minutely researched and impenetrably dull.  Historical fiction often walks this fine line, and we shall see where Feldman plumps down in my opinion.

  Laura Fish Strange Music (Jonathan Cape)

Historical fiction number four (I'm beginning to warm to this trend), and this time with extra literary kudos for starring a Victorian poet of repute.  I remember reading reviews of this book in the broadsheets months ago, and remembering the name of the author, but I'd forgotten how interesting it sounded: it apparently intertwines the stories of ailing poet Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) with those of a maidservant and a former slave employed on the Barrett family estate in Jamaica.  Great concept; great cover.

V V Ganeshananthan Love Marriage (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

This novel was sent to me in proof several months ago, and I popped on my interminable TBR shelf only to forget about it soon after.  I can't say I'm wildly inspired by the premise, but since I have it it'd be a shame not to try it. 

Yalini, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, finds herself caught between the history of her ancestors and her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, she is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.

While Kumaran's loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family's roots—and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils—through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran's death and his daughter's politically motivated nuptials edge closer, in the tradition of her family, Yalini too must decide where she stands.

Allegra Goodman Intuition (Atlantic Books)

Another one I already have. I have read very good reviews of it, which convinced me that a book about scientific discovery and corruption was worth a look. Here is a snippet from the linked review by Abigail Nussbaum at Asking the Wrong Questions (which is well worth a read in itself):

Intuition takes place in Boston in the mid-80s. In the small, chronically under-funded Mendelssohn-Glass lab, post-doctoral fellow Cliff makes a discovery that seems to have been lifted wholesale out of the most unrealistic popular-culture depiction of science. His heretofore unsuccessful attempts to attack breast cancer cells with a genetically modified virus, which he had been ordered to stop by the lab's directors, Marion Mendelssohn and Sandy Glass, appear to be bearing fruit. Several of his experimental mice, deliberately given cancer and then exposed to the virus, have gone into remission. For Cliff, this promising result marks a dramatic turnaround in his prospects at the lab. Overnight, he is transformed from a golden boy who never lived up to his potential to one who has made good. Cautious Marion and exuberant Sandy sanction another round of experiments, and when these show dramatic results--a 60% rate of remission--they dedicate the entire lab to Cliff's research, scrambling to draw attention to themselves within the scientific community, through journal publications, and in the general media, through puff pieces in People and Time.

Samantha Harvey The Wilderness (Jonathan Cape)

The Wilderness wins the prize for most-depressing synopsis on this year's list: Jake Jameson, a sixty-five year old architect has Alzheimer's and is suffering under the disintegration of his identity.  He is the very epitome of an unreliable witness, his memories shifting and changing, and innumerable questions arising out of the mysteries of his past.  If it is well-written it could well be beautiful as its cover.  The library has copies out on loan, and I've patiently put my name on the list for one.

 

Samantha Hunt The Invention of Everything Else (HarvillSecker)

Yet another historical novel, and yet another famous subject, this time the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla.  Apparrently it also stars a number of pigeons.  I remember reading a luke warm review of it in The Guardian, but the publisher's blurb is eye-catching:

A wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lives out his last days.

From the moment she first catches sight of the Hotel New Yorker's most famous resident on New Years Day 1943, Louisa — obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the guests — is determined to befriend this strange man. As Louisa discovers their shared affinity for pigeons, she also begins to piece together Tesla's extraordinary story of life as an immigrant, a genius, and a halfhearted capitalist.

Meanwhile, Louisa — faced with her father's imminent departure in a time machine to reunite with his late wife, and pleasantly unsettled by the arrival in her life of a mysterious mechanic (perhaps from the future) named Arthur — begins to suspect that she has understood something about the relationship of love and invention that Tesla, for all his brilliance, never did.

Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus)

Hmmmm. Another book from last year's Booker longlist making an appearance.  I tried it then and I didn't really like it.  Which probably means it is destined for the shortlist, at which point I'll give it a second try.  I'd love to give you a synopsis, but the premise is incredibly complicated.  My summation is: man looses dog in the Australian outback; life crumbles; contemporary angst ensues.

  Deirdre Madden Molly Fox’s Birthday (Faber)

I've never heard of Deirdre Madden and it would appear that is my loss.  She has been described as a 'pivotal voice in Northern Irish writing', and her fiction called understated and complex.  She has won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Somerset Maugham Award.  Molly Fox's Birthday is her 7th novel and her second Orange nomination (she was shortlisted for One by One in the Darkness in 1997).  The premise of the novel doesn't sound all that promising, but her reputation teaches me not to judge it on those terms: In the course of a midsummer's day, a playwright goes about her everyday activities in her friend Molly's house in Dublin, borrowed while the actor is working in New York. She meditates on their friendship, and on how an earlier friendship with a student at Trinity, Andrew Forde, has expanded to accommodate the three of them.

Toni Morrison A Mercy (Chatto & Windus)

Morrison is the biggest and most venerable name here, on the list with her 9th novel.  A Mercy is another historical novel (and the third concerned with slavery),  short at 176 pages and set in 1680s America.  Its principals are Florens, an eight year old slave in New York sold away from her mother, and Lina, an older Native American servant; the themes, as you can imagine, are freedom, intolerance, identity and religion.  I've read two of Morrison's earlier novels - Beloved and Song of Solomon, both of which I loved - and am looking forward to reading this when it comes available at the library.  Esther tells me that Love, the novel before this one, was a bit of a disappointment but I can't imagine Morrison writing badly.

Gina Ochsner The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Books)

I know of Ochsner through her acclaimed short story collection People I Wanted To Be, but this novel sounds truly bizarre.  The synopsis must speak for itself:

In her very dusty provincial museum of fake exhibits lovingly crafted from cardboard, wire and glue, Tanya dreams of Russian art's long colors and wonders when Yuri will stop fishing long enough to notice how she adores him, while she tries the zero-one-zero diet in order to meet Aeroflot's maximum waist requirements for trainee cabin-crew. When her boss at the museum gives her the vast responsibility of cultivating some potential benefactors from America, and persuading them to give their money to the very needy All-Russian All-Cosmopolitan City Museum, Tanya finds herself involuntarily enlisting all her neighbors in the scheme. But their shared hopes of riches and dreams of escape start to rot.And the rounded corpse of Mircha in the courtyard refuses to decompose, as the snow turns it into a hill, and its spirit takes flight around the apartments, dispensing more advice than anyone desires, goading the men, annoying the women, in a block where too many mothers and fathers are missing and too many memories lie stagnant on old battlefields.

Marilynne Robinson Home (Virago)

The list's second big-hitter, I think.  Home is a sort-of-sequel to the achingly good Pulitzer-prize winning Gilead and has been on my TBR pile since the day it was released.  It is contemporaneous with the story in Gilead, and whereas that novel focused on Rev. John Ames, a Congregationalist Minister, Home turns its gaze on his friend Robert Broughton, the town's Presbyterian minister and his eight children.  As he also comes to the end of his life, his youngest daughter Glory has been co-opted as his care-giver, and his prodigal son Jack (who we know from Gilead) has just returned home.  I honestly can't wait.

Preeta Samarasan Evening is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate)

I'm starting to tire a little now, and my interest is waning a little.  There isn't much in this one that cries out 'read me'.  I feel like I've read this novel half a dozen times already: marriage, women, disappointed love, domineering families, thwarted ambition... 

Set on the outskirts of Ipoh in Malaysia, Samarasan's impressive debut chronicles another bad year in the Big House on Kingfisher Lane. With the death of Paati, the grandmother, and the disgraceful departure of Chellam, the family's servant girl, the wealthy Rajasekharan family is in shambles. Skillfully jumping from one consciousness to another, Samarasan moves back in time to reveal the secrets that have led to the family's unraveling. Father Raju's dreams have been stifled by his unrealized political ambitions, and his home life is no consolation. Vasanthi, his wife, bristles at reminders of her lower-class roots and wouldn't mind seeing Uma, their oldest daughter, "destroyed by an endless string of disappointments." Uma all but disconnects herself from the family in anticipation of escaping to Columbia University, and her six-year-old sister, Aasha, whose desire to recapture Uma's love is a primary focus of the book, must settle for interactions with a ghost only she can see.

I'm probably being unfair, and I'll keep it in mind for the paper back release.

Kamila Shamsie Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury)

I love the cover of this novel. Isn't is beautiful? I wish it didn't sound like the prototypical 9/11 novel:

August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki: Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts.But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11.

Curtis Sittenfeld American Wife (Doubleday)

Sittenfield and I have a history of incompatibility. I tried her debut novel, Prep, way back in 2006 when I read the Orange longlist for the first time.  I wasn't the right reader for the book - I still feel frustration when I think about it - but her third novel sounds much more attractive to me.  It seems an innovative way of writing about the dilemmas and crises of the last decade; could it be a new type of 9/11 novel?  It is a story about being First Lady to a contentious President who starts a disastrous war on the other side of the world; the parallel to George and Laura Bush is obvious and overt.  Not sure what the period cover is all about.

Miriam Toews The Flying Troutmans (Faber)

It sounds as though this is the long list's comedy novel. The synopsis reads a little like a precis of the film Little Miss Sunshine, with an overwhelmed aunt driving her nephew and niece across America to find their long-missing father after their mother has been sectioned.  Publisher's Weekley promises 'a quest in which the characters learn about themselves and each other as they weather car repairs, sleazy motel rooms and encounters with bizarre people. Toews's gift for writing precocious children and the story's antic momentum redeem the familiar set-up...'  Which sounds fun enough, but perhaps not the literary giant we might hope for on a literary prize list.  

Ann Weisgarber The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (Macmillan New Writing)

Phew, we've made it to the end of the list at last (and if you've made it too, congratulations) and to Ann Weisgarber's debut (historical!) novel.  Because I'm exhausted, and because I've never heard of it till you, here is a quick publisher's blurb:

It is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands, and summer has been hard. Fourteen years have passed since Rachel and Isaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land. Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is fiercely proud: black families are rare in the West, and black ranchers even rarer. But it hasn't rained in months, the cattle bellow with thirst, and supplies are dwindling.Pregnant, and struggling to feed her family, Rachel is isolated by more than just geography. She is determined to give her surviving children the life they deserve, but she knows that her husband will never leave his ranch: land means a measure of equality with the white man, and Isaac DuPree is not about to give it up just because times are hard. Somehow Rachel must find the strength to do what is right - for her children, for her husband, and for herself. Moving and majestic, "The Personal History of Rachel DuPree" is an unforgettable novel about love and loyalty, homeland and belonging. Above all, it is the story of one woman's courage in the face of the most punishing adversity.

 

There we have it.  Some promising, interesting stuff, although there are some notable omissions, I think. Helen Garner's The Spare Room has lost out again, Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant is missing - Canongate publishes both and must be fuming - and, of course, Zoe Heller's The Believers was eligible too.  I'll be watching to see what turns up on the New Writer's shortlist in a few weeks time, given that there are six debuts on the longlist which are eligible.

 

~Victoria~

The Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, 2009

The shortlist for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction was announced yesterday. (Doesn't seem like two minutes since I finished reading last year's list...). As has become my habit, I shall be reading and reviewing them.

Here, via Torque Control, it is:

• Song of Time, Ian R. MacLeod
• The Quiet War, Paul McAuley
• House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds
• Anathem, Neal Stephenson
• The Margarets, Sheri S. Tepper
• Martin Martin's on the Other Side, Mark Wernham
  

I've already read two of them: The Margarets, a solid but not spectacular effort from Tepper that I reviewed for Strange Horizons last year (and so won't do a separate piece on it here); and the excellent Song of Time, a review of which will be appearing here shortly. I've started a third, the intimidatingly mountainous Anathem, which (thus far at least) is managing to leaven its inherent po-facedness with some silly humour.

The other three are all from authors new to me (if not, in the case of both Reynolds and McAuley, new to my interminable TBR pile...), so I couldn't possibly prejudge, except to note an entirely unfounded suspicion that the Wernham will be this year's Red Men. I have to confess that, on first glance, none of them strike me as deeply unusual or intriguing - but I thought that about two of last year's list, before I read them, and they both turned out very well indeed.

~~Nic

It's a Man's World

Time for another reprint review. This is of the entirely splendid Young Adult-ish novel Graceling, by Kristin Cashore, and it first appeared in SFX magazine #179 (February 2009). I loved it for many of the same reasons I loved Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword - fun and very readable and a (non-heavy-handed) exploration of gendered power dynamics in a fantasy setting. Huzzah!

~~~~

To most subjects of the Seven Kingdoms, the individuals known as the Graced might as well be the Cursed. Born with powers like super strength, lightning reflexes, mind reading, and marked out by their non-matching eyes, the Graced are viewed with greed by kings – who ruthlessly exploit their abilities – and superstitious fear by everyone else.

For much of her young life, Katsa has been the pet thug of her unpleasant royal uncle, King Randa. Graced with enormous strength and speed, trained for combat and little else, Katsa is sent out to bash heads and break fingers of lordlings and tradesmen who displease Randa. Sickened by her role, but too cowed to refuse, Katsa finds secret ways to undermine her uncle, and imagines escape.

Cashore’s prose is smooth and unobtrusive, combining the simpler language of a novel aimed primarily at teenagers with the quiet lilt of sentences that are short without being choppy. The plot is similarly pared down; this is always Katsa’s story, and enjoyably fast-paced it is too. But for all its lightness of tone, Graceling is not a simple novel. Indeed, it deals with some very difficult subject matter, notably an abusive parent whose Grace enables him to conceal the harm he does from others, preventing his victims from being believed. Its inevitable love story, moreover, is sweetly unconventional – and unabashedly feminist.

Katsa herself is a rich and appealing character: taciturn, reckless, loyal, and amusingly literal minded. Long years of others’ disgust have left her closed-off, convinced that she is nothing but a killer; but her few friendships are portrayed very fully, and the growth of her trust and self-esteem is the understated heart of the novel.

Post-Xena, Buffy, and a host of lesser imitators, an arse-kicking young woman would be unremarkable, but for two things. The first is that Katsa’s strength is never a solution in itself; she is effectively powerless unless she can use it as she chooses. The second is that Cashore never pretends that one woman who can fight back makes everything better, in a world where so much power rests in the hands of abusers, and so many girls have no means of defending themselves. Perhaps the most uplifting part of the tale is when Katsa begins to share her skills, as much as she can, with other young women, giving them the gift of self-reliance.

An immensely fun, good-hearted read.

~~~~

Incidentally, consider this novel an object lesson in why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. The picture at the top of the post is the US edition (a dustjacket that, incidentally, wraps a small hardback of beautiful quality); the picture here comes from the UK cover, in which Our Heroine has apparently forgotten to dress for the weather. (The ground she's standing on doesn't look all that stable, either.) Luckily, she's had the foresight to pose with her back to the light, so that the details of her face don't interfere with her ability to be Everyfantasywoman (read: object).

Clearly the publisher was hoping to snag the supernatural romance/urban fantasy market; certainly no-one paid attention to the actual prose. There are so many ways I could rant about this, but my weary lack of surprise is hampering my rage. (See also this post, from a different publisher but reflecting, I suspect, much the same mindset, which just made me sad.) It's a kick in the teeth to see such a ballsy novel saddled with an objectifying and unrepresentative (and silly) cover as this; but it's par for the course, isn't it?

Still, had I not been sent Graceling for review, I would have taken it for urban fantasy and never given it a try; and that would have been a real shame.

~~Nic

And now for an interlude of light fiction...

[N.B. Please forgive the erratic text formatting. I wrote this post in Word and tried to transfer it to Typepad with bizarre unfixable results.]

I’ve sat a good 10 minutes thinking about how to start my review of Fiona Robyn’s debut novel, The Letters.  My difficulty, I think, stems from an inability to neatly categorise it. It looks like one thing, and is partly another.  The cover has the flavour of ‘women’s fiction’ about it, if not exactly ‘chick lit’; and the blurb appears to confirm that with its opening salvo: ‘Violet Ackerman has drifted through a career, four children and a divorce without know who she is or what she wants.’  But it comes from Snowbooks, a small press I admire for their publishing acumen.  They have a knack, I think, for spotting books that are highly saleable –  that look like chick lit or thrillers or historical romance – but which deliver something much more under cover of populism.   Thus The Letters looks like the saga of a mid-life love affair (and will probably sell best to women over forty), but turns out to be more a four-part harmony about parenthood, sexuality, village life and psychological breakdown. I'm not ashamed to say that I read it compulsively with great relish and enjoyment.

What the blurb says is true:  Violet Ackerman, now aged 51, has indeed drifted through a career, four children (now all in their 20s) and a divorce.  She has moved to the coast – to the village of Abbotsfield – and she is a member of the eccentric Village Committee.  No doubt at all that her relationship with her lover is turbulent.   But here the selling cliché ends.   For example, Abbotsfield is not the picture postcard village of our imaginations:

... it wasn’t picturesque in the slightest.  A few of the houses were covered in that nasty grey lumpy stuff like porridge, and there weren’t any tearooms, just a Post Office that was ‘closed for lunch’.

And the Village Committee isn’t composed of flowery ‘ladies who lunch’ and retired military gentleman, as you might picture it from an episode of Midsomer Murders.   Instead there is Will, a young businessman on the verge of his second nervous breakdown; Angie and Sue, inimitable enemies fuming at each other across the Minutes; Rob, who lives alone in his miniature flat; Peggy, whose housekeeping leaves much to be desired; and Margaret, who strives for professionalism in the face of such rank disorder.  And Violet. 

Violet lacks something in the way of social skills.  She admits this to herself quite candidly:

She’d never been natural at developing connections.  Other people seemed to find it so easy.  She sometimes imagined them as having lots of different coloured strings attached to their bodies, representing the things about themselves that other people would find attractive or interesting.  All they had to do was take the end of one of these strings and offer it to a passing stranger, and the stranger seemed willing to take it and become a friend.  It didn’t seem to matter what it was – a mutual interest in showing Persians, the perfect recipe for asparagus soufflé, even a common fascination with the weather over the next few days.  She saw it happening all around her, half of her scoffing at the inanity of the exchanges, and the other half a tiny bit jealous.

She has spent her life devoted to her work – as a structural engineer – and fails to see why she should pander to other people’s emotions or fancies.  She is blunt and says exactly what she thinks, often without considering the consequences; when she is angry, she flings words about like anvils.  She is completely at a loss in the face of others’ distress, and is more likely to laugh, or instruct someone to ‘pull themselves together’, than to offer a shoulder to cry on.  Her own children tiptoe around her, afraid to tell her about their life plans in case she derides and ridicules them.  In this she is unconsciously like her own mother, with whom she has a frosty, critical relationship.  Her difficult affair with her partner arises out of her inability to connect with her emotions, or admit her own failings.  Despite all this, Violet is an intensely likeable woman: forthright, determined, unabashed and, underneath it all, very loving.  It is not difficult to understand why her children keep turning back to her; or why her lover always wants to give her just one more chance.  She is disconnected rather than cruel. 

The letters of the title, which punctuate the novel at intervals, start to drop through Violet’s letterbox at a particularly difficult time.  Her son, Guy, has moved in with her after yet another unsuccessful attempt at a career; she has split up with her partner; and the Village Committee is in vitriolic meltdown.  They are addressed to her, but appear to have no bearing on her life.  Originally sent in 1959, they are written by Elizabeth, a young woman in a Mother and Baby home, to her best friend Beatrice.  They are a confession of pre-marital sex and interracial love, and articulate Elizabeth’s attempt to negotiate her intuitive feelings with the strict mores of the society of which she is a part.   They strike a chord with Violet, partly because she is as compelled by a bittersweet narrative as anyone else, and partly because they disturb her.  She is convinced they have nothing to do with her, and yet there is something hauntingly and perceptibly familiar about them. 

Familiarity and alienation are twin moons orbiting character and plot in The Letters.  Everything about the immediate synopsis of Violet’s life is utterly familiar and safe; but the letters, the vulnerable neighbours, the cacophonous children are all alien, even uncanny.  Violet experiences herself as part way between these two states – synonymous with normality and abnormality, I suppose – which are almost akin to two worlds.  This is the source of the novels cleverness, because it is the root of its subtlety.  It means that Violet’s mundane, almost clichéd existence is tempered with a weirdness; not an unsettling weirdness but a weirdness that successfully replicates the human experience of feeling simultaneously ordinary/one-of-many and extraordinary/unique.  Couple this with Robyn’s ability to replicate (and parody) the behaviours of this generation of parents and adult children very well (I recognise my own mother, and myself), and you have a highly successful piece of popular fiction.

This is not to claim that The Letters is a literary or philosophical novel, nor an existential masterpiece.  But it is very good at being what it is: articulate, well-observed, tightly plotted, sweet and funny.  It is certainly on a pedestal above similarly jacketed books on 3 for 2 tables.

~~Victoria~~

One year down, one to go...

[Warning:  This post is almost entirely unrelated to books.]

I have spent the last two weeks in a state of constant agitation and irritation, brought on by my latest Archives course assignment.  Training to be an archivist is proving far more stressful, and time-consuming, than I expected.  This time I had to write a 4000 word scoping report for an SME (small to medium enterprise, for the blissfully uninitiated) on the introduction of a digital preservation programme.  It didn't actually bring me to tears but oh so very nearly.  Thank all the gods, great and small, that it was the final piece of work for my first year.  I am now deliciously free until the last week in April when I go for my second residential week in Aberystwyth.  Next year promises to be a lot more fun: paleography, content and use of manuscipts, records creation from the medieval to modern period and, finally, cataloguing and listing.  The latter is the crux of the matter since cataloguing and  listing is an archivist's primary professional purpose and the chance of getting a good post without it is almost nil; I'm sure they save it till last so you can't ditch out half way through the degree.  This is no doubt also the reason they force you through Records Management and Digital Records in the first year.  It certainly helps them winnow the candidates.  As far as I can tell only three other students from the April 2008 complement of 14 have made it through to April 2009.  

 I may have said this before but: this vocational degree has to be one of the hardest things I've done in my life.  When I finish it I think I will rate the achievement above my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, because it has been such a trial.  Working full time and coming home to two more hours of studying, plus five or so hours at the weekend - more if I'm working on an assignment - is exhausting and not a little demoralising.  I barely have time to read any more. It will all be worth it in the end, I know, but right now it often feels like a straitjacket.  Then there is the fact that all the skills I acquired writing history and literature essays counts for almost nothing.  Since I started I've written reports, presentations, strategies, costed budgets and made several business cases but I've yet to write an essay. This is all good practise for my professional life but requires me to learn new forms of writing from scratch.   I'm verbose by nature; it hurts to structure and crop so rigorously.  Oh for a high-flown introduction, or a clever concluding riposte. 

I enjoy my archives day-job more than ever, which keeps me going.  That and the fact that all my colleagues warned me of this: that the MSc is tedium and slog, but the work on the other side is an indulgence.  I spent most of last week working on the papers of a 16th century court case, a dispute between two brothers over their mother's estate.  Included in the bundle were the depositions of seven witnesses, testifying that Elizabeth Penrose, the mother, had repeatedly stated her intent of leaving her property to her elder son because she didn't like her younger son's wife.  They contained all sorts of wonderful observations about the family, and the rhythm of life in a Yorkshire village, c. 1555.  So, yes, being paid for transcribing it and writing about it is a gift, and worth every second of the MSc, digital preservation scoping report and all. 

Now perhaps I can work on finishing Bleak House, which I started reading in December last year, and catch up on some new releases that I've had sitting around for months: Marilynne Robinson's Home, and John Burnside's Glister, and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, and Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. 

~~Victoria~~