Tuesday 31 May 2022

“Burntcoat” by Sarah Hall - review


“Burntcoat” by Sarah Hall:

This is not your run-of-the-mill dystopian pandemic novel although there is a virus and all and everything is breaking apart. The narrator in this minimalistic epic is Edith, a sculptor of monumental, award-winning wooden sculptures and her story is by far not easy to digest but revelatory in its cruelty. Themes of art, sex, violence and difficult relationships play against a background of disaster in the form of a deadly pandemic. 


Edith lives and works in Burntcoat, a former vast warehouse which she transformed into a combination of home and studio space. Her narrative moves between the north of England and Japan where she once learnt the traditional woodwork burning techniques she employs in her art. But the narrative also travels back and forth in time, from her childhood (she was raised by a single mother who was disabled by a brain haemorrhage) to her art-school years and present artistic fame. 


In Burntcoat she begins a love affair with Halit, an immigrant chef. Lockdown comes, society collapses and Halit moves in with her. One day he goes out to get food from his former restaurant and comes home bleeding. In relentless prose we are forced to watch as a few days later he develops lesions and his illness and rapid decline begins. From this moment on we see the dissolution of the self by disease, we feel the dehumanizing, transformative power of the virus, so much more vicious than the one we had to endure during the last two years, and it affects everything dear to us: security, love, sexuality and creativity. We suddenly realize that we, that the whole world, had been spared a much more cruel fate and we suddenly see Life for what it always was: ephemeral. 


This is as much a tale of love as of death, of anguish and hurt, of loss and hope. As the wood which Edith burnishes in her art she became burnt, damaged but also more resilient.


 “A life is a bead of water on the  black surface, so frail, so strong.“



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Sunday 29 May 2022

“Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell“ by Susanna Clarke - review

“Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke:


I have been lured into reading this book by the author’s latest one, Piranesi, which I liked for its scope, its phantastical metaphors and, not least, for its concise, precise brevity.


This book now, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is all but brief. It is a hefty monster of over 1000 pages. And I struggled through every one of them. It has not always been a pleasure. While at first amusing, it soon, over wide stretches, lost its charmes, grew tedious and boring until only towards the end it recovered its drive. 


It was and is not a bad book. I would even go as far as saying that it is a brilliant tale. The language is superb, witty, full of dark humour and glee, the descriptions of situations, landscapes and people sparkling and full of insight, the evoked images and phantasies plentiful and often truly surprising. The prose is classical sophisticated, nostalgic and yet timeless. I personally found it a tiny bit too long. Nevertheless, the book had me, true to its nature, under its spell. I could never, as often as I wished, put it away. So, in the end the satisfaction to have, together with the protagonists, gone through the labour, to have, despite all agonies, endured, prevailed and succeeded, now stays with me. I am not so sure that the novel itself will.


I shall not go through the plot. Suffice it to say that it is a truly ingenious tale, set in an Old England in a very British society, roughly 18th century Victorian, complete with obedient servants and conceited, callous, snobbish masters. The book is plot-driven, the story itself is not all light and bright, there is dark magic and cruelty, too. The two main protagonists, carefully crafted like most of the other characters, are two magicians, who are, one easily guesses it, the titular Mr. Norrell and Mr. Strange. Very different in character they at first work together, then oppose each other only to come back together in the end in a quest and fight against some evil which has befallen them personally and the country in general. Much happens and they, their loved ones and England, prevail. 


All in all a nice, sometimes surprsingly entertaining and ingeniously crafted book. I could have done with a shorter version but I am sure that for the phantasy inclined reader it will be a brilliant and rewarding indulgence.




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Tuesday 17 May 2022

“Piranesi“ by Susanna Clarke - review


 “Piranesi“ by Susanna Clarke:

A delightful genre bending novel, a surprising dreamlike world full of suspense, mystery, murder and bookish thinking. 


it is a study of solitude and isolation, of someone living in in a mysterious world of vast interconnected halls, precisely 7,678 of them, that go on for miles in all directions, with stairs leading up to more and more levels, forming an infinite labyrinth of halls and vestibules in which countless marble statues have their home. The halls in the basement of the palace are regularly flooded by the tides of oceans that lead to crashing sweeps of water covering everything.


“The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite”: this is the reverential proclamation of Piranesi, a man about 30 years old, who believes he lived in this place “since the world began”. He seems curiously content with his fate, even though he seems to be utterly alone. He wanders about this enormous, bewildering palace, exploring and cataloguing it meticulously. He believes himself to be one of the two inhabitants of the house, the other being “The Other“, a man, different from him, twice his age with whom he meets occassionally.


There is a sense of isolation but also the feeling that this could be paradise. Piranesi clearly is devoted to his home and draws all of his life’s purpose from it. Piranesi is not his real name but a name given to him by the Other in reference to an Italian 16th century architect, archaeologist and artist, famous for his drawings of intricate etchings of Rome and atmospheric prisons.


We learn more and more of this universe and slowly understand it as a metaphor for the alternative universe that we all inhabit in our heads. It is a world which was created by ideas flowing out of another, our real, world and is a representation of ideas and concepts and a link to “ancient knowledge long forgotten“.


Clarke manages a vivd tale full of suspense and apprehension, while at the same time keeping the prose simple and concise. At first confusing and mysterious, the tale slowly shifts in shocking twists and revelations and comes to a satisfying end. 



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Tuesday 10 May 2022

“Companion Piece“ by Ali Smith - review


 “Companion Piece” by Ali Smith:

Two years after her famous Seasonal Quartet’s concluding volume Summer, recently published Companion Piece feels as a fifth installment of the Quartet, beautiful, light and playful as ever.


In all of the books I’ve read by Ali Smith one thing became soon very clear: She loves wordplay, puns, homonyms and any weird multi-faceted, multi-interpretable story. She revels in etymology. All her books are an intellectual treat. All her books show a remarkable capability for inventive, surprising connections. 


And so, again in this book. It springs from the same source as its predecessor, the Seasonal Quartet. The idea is to write about contemporary events as close as possible and show what effect these events have on the writer. It is an experiment in creating real-time fiction, driven by the News, yet managing to be profoundly thoughtful. In quite a masterly manner Smith captures the horrors of our time and simultaneously mirrors their absurdities. But writing text that is so dependent on contemporary events also means to ensure that the gap between experienced life, writing and publishing would not become too great. Whereas the Seasonal Quartet called for a self-imposed strict structural approach now, that the Quartet is finished, the pressure to satisfyingly conclude it and to make ends meet, is off and a new freedom in storytelling is gained instead. The spirit in this new novel somehow soars even higher, lighter, freer. 


The story itself is typical Smith, too. Again there is a focus on present-day anxieties which the recent lockdown, the isolation and restrictions, brought on and finally led to an uprise of oddball thinking in society. The novel comes in two parts, its structure closely related to Smith’s How to be both. First comes a contemporary section followed by a meandering story-within-a-story, set in medieval times of pestilence, poverty, injustice and famine. In juxtaposing the two times, in creating points of contact between two female artists and two plagues five centuries apart, the two stories always reflect or mirror, always contemplate, counterbalance or enhance each other and so make us aware that the problems we think of as being distinctly contemporary, like gender identity, work equality, isolationist restrictions towards aliens, are rooted deeply in our history. Like in most of her novels plot is often secondary to perspective and the accumulation of emotional, social and cultural layers. 


And this layering is exactly what the first-person narrator, Sandy Gray, a single queer painter in her mid-50s, does. In her art she layers words, poems, meaning, emotions and colours on canvas. In the Seasonal Quartet Smith used several actual women artists as means to highlight a tune or serve as a mood indicator. Here in Companion Piece, the heroine/ narrator herself is creating art which is her life’s companion and provides what other human companionship couldn’t give. 


Sandy lives alone in her rented home and temporarily takes care of her father’s dog. Her father had to be hospitalized after a heart-attack and she is barred from seeing him because of the pandemic. Sandy’s mother left them when Sandy was a girl and he and Sandy only have each other as family and are, despite many great differences, devoted to each other. O-tone father: “All that learning, and all you’ve done with it is make a life’s work of for Christ sake painting words on top of one another so nobody can even read them.”  


One day she receives a phone-call from a person, Martina, she once not-really-knew and not-really-liked at college, in fact they only shared one conversation about a poem by e. e. cummings. Then the story unfolds and meanders in typical Smith ways. Martina tells a strange story that happened to her. While working in curatorial function for the National Museum she was detained at border control on her return from abroad with the Boothby Lock, a finely wrought, intricate piece of 16th century English lock and key in her baggage. Assuming it was a weapon, they kept her in isolation for seven and a half hours where Martina then began to hear a voice stating: “Curlew or curfew,” then: “You choose.”


The story proves to be transformative, not only for Martina and Sandy, but also for the children of Martina, young adult twins, super woke, non-binary, awfully narcissistic and neurotically egotistical. Their research leads them to the house of Sandy whom they accuse for being the sole culprit for their mother's sudden and inexplicable transformation. Miscommunications and delightful funny verbal sparring escalate and they enter and take over Sandy’s home, forcing her to seek refuge in her father’s presently empty house to avoid their constant jabbering, presumptuous, annoying, acronymic text-speak. All these disruptions from routine, typical Smith again, bring on transformation and Sandy is forced to open up.


Smith often invites us to follow her alongside a stream of consciousness, meandering, yet consistent and philosophically tinted. She playfully leaps from investigations of words or ideas to cultural references in poems or songs. Jumping from etymology to history to literature and then turning back to daily life and thus showing that all this is material of and for the big painting of life, that is Smith’s great achievement. 


Alongside the tale and in between we are given a short history lesson in blacksmiths or the bubonic plague, a digression in the manifold meanings of the word “hello”, we hear about the curlew bird, we are made aware of the resemblance of its beak in medieval masks, worn as a shield against the Black Death, we learn how the ancient Egyptian symbol for a bird over time transformed into the mathematical sign for greater than and we follow the story of a gifted 14th century blacksmith who was branded and expelled by the community for attempting to work in the trade as a girl. This girl, together with its curlew bird companion, not only makes an appearance in her own time but, miraculously, pops up in Sandy's home who takes her for a homeless, slightly deranged person. 


By exploring binaries and their often blurred boundaries in chapters titled imagination versus reality, surface versus depth, real versus fake and stories versus lies, Smith makes us aware that indetermination could possibly be experienced as a joyful embrace of opposites. She also makes us aware that every person, creature or thing has the capability to become a companion. Smith’s concerns with grief, cruelty, language and art weave through this novel again with wit, warmth and feeling and she has created yet another book, as enigmatic, complex  and intellectually rewarding as her former ones. It shares the best qualities found in the Quartet and is a suitable companion piece to it.



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Thursday 5 May 2022

“There but for the“ by Ali Smith - review


 “There but for the” by Ali Smith:

Another book by Ali Smith, the sixth book of her I’ve read so far. And again such a very fine one. 


One evening, at the home of the Lees, a quite posh, preposterous middle/upperclass family, at the invitation of the maddeningly, awfully conceited Genevieve Lee, people come for one of her annual “alternative“ gatherings in her elegant “certificated“ 16th century house in Greenwich. The dinner party does not go at all well in the way Mrs. Lee has had pictured it would. In between the main course and dessert one of the guests, Miles Garth, a pleasant, thoughtful and charming young man, until this evening unknown to the host, goes upstairs and locks himself in the spare bedroom and refuses to come out again. For months. 


Mrs. Lee, because she believes herself to be a liberal-minded, understanding person, refuses to call in the police, but still wants it to be known how generous a person she is and how terribly, terribly she suffers from this interruption of her daily routine and therefore decides to talk to the News of her predicament. Soon after word gets out a camp of occupiers forms around the house and under the window where Miles lives, complete with oddballs and religious fanatics who only wait for “Milo“, their new involuntary saint, to show himself at the window. Which he does not do. This is the basic story and the start of a truly imaginary, clever tale.


The novel then splits into four sections: THERE, BUT, FOR and THE. Each section is dominated by one of four people who have been touched by Miles in some way before in their lives. There are connections that don't quite connect and apparent non-connections that do. The key characters are all of above average intelligence and have found out, in one way or other, that it can be quite hard to find a place in the world, especially if one doesn’t blend in with the mass.


There is the woman Anna who met Miles on a trip round Europe as a teenager 30 years before. 


There is the man Mark who brought Miles to the dinner party in the first place, a 59-year-old gay picture researcher.


There is the woman May, old and dying, left alone by everything and everyone to pass away in a hospital. Miles, since the untimely death of her daughter, has visited her once a year to mark this anniversary. Her part to me was especially heartbreaking in its touchingly true understanding of how regret can define one's last days.


But the life and soul of the book is Brooke, a precocious child, the 10-year-old daughter of another couple who went to the same dinner party, significantly black, clever and, for her penchant and love for puns, often rather irritating to her environment. Brooke is the only one who sees the stranger in the spare room as a real human being rather than a nuisance, and who gets him to respond where others have failed simply by telling jokes. She is a true artist and the moral voice of the book.


The writing in this book makes reading an active experience. The text is stuffed with puns and punning, with wordplays, clues and riddles. The book plays with form, with structure and most of all with language. This is a book about storytelling, about how we communicate and how we connect or not connect with others. It is a novel that explores themes of identity as much as race, religion, class, and sexuality, and how the use and role of language shapes our definition of people or our perception of the world. The mirroring, unveiling power of language is all over and very present, for example, at the dinner party, an amazing, witty, chamber play that descends brilliantly into a comedy of drunkenness, sexual tension, pretentiousness, bigotry and envy.


A recurring motif is the increasing shabbiness, staleness and falseness of modern life with its dependency on the internet that "promises everything but everything isn't there" and that only offers "a whole new way of feeling lonely".


This is a beautifully clever tale, full of human life, from childhood to death. A clever novel that, for all its cleverness, is not boastful but touchingly warm.



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“Old God's Time“ by Sebastian Barry - review

  “Old God's Time” by Sebastian Barry: It is somewhere in the middle of the 1990s in Dalkey at the Irish sea and widower Tom Kettle, f...