Tag: contemporary fiction

The Improbability of Love (2015): Hannah Rothschild

4 Comments

★★★

I’ve said before that my reaction to books is often affected by the context in which they’re read. Unfortunately Hannah Rothschild’s Improbability of Love will always be associated, for me, with the bleakness of my country’s vote to leave the EU. I can’t go into my feelings in depth here; I only hope that we find a way to mitigate the disastrous divisions in our society and to keep our relationship with Europe strong. In the meantime, we just have to keep our chins up and hope for the best. And so; back to the book.

Continue reading →

The Parable Book (2013): Per Olov Enquist

Leave a comment

★★★

My one previous experience with Per Elov Enquist was via his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician, and it wasn’t an entirely comfortable introduction. I puzzled over what to make of the book’s jagged, disjointed style and was troubled by its detached emotional tone. At the time I wondered whether it was down to author, or translator, but now I can say, quite confidently, that it’s the author’s style. The Parable Book, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner, has much the same cool, conceptual flavour. It is, however, a rather different beast from the Royal Physician: whereas that was a clear historical novel, this book weaves between genres. Is it novel, autobiography, family memoir, confessional history or philosophical exploration? It is even more disorientating than the Royal Physician, but it makes its mark: there’s something fierce and vivid and urgent at its heart.

Continue reading →

The Last Days of Summer (2016): Vanessa Ronan

1 Comment

★★★★

And now for something completely different. This book arrived in the post a few weeks ago, unsolicited and unheralded, and I was a little perplexed at first because it’s so very unlike anything that I normally read. On the other hand, I am not the kind of girl to turn down a free book and so I dutifully plunged in. It has been a strange experience. Lyrical but not poetic, violent yet gentle, it’s the kind of book you can’t quite shake off. Its mood clings to you like the scent of the diner in its pages, or like the thick, draining heat that blankets the Texan prairie on which the story unfolds.

Continue reading →

The Best of Everything (1958): Rona Jaffe

2 Comments

★★★★

The easiest way I can describe this book, which follows four young women working in a New York publishing house in the early 1950s, is to ask you to think of Sex and the City crossed with Mad Men. With that description in mind you might be tempted to write it off as sugary vintage froth: a feast of twin-sets, cocktails and giggling bespectacled secretaries called Mary-Jane or Betty-Ann. But you’d be doing it an injustice. First published in 1958, this novel was written before the period had a chance to be romanticised, when the author herself had similar experiences fresh in her mind. It’s darker, shrewder and considerably more rewarding than you might expect.

Continue reading →

The Goldfinch (2013): Donna Tartt

3 Comments

★★★★ ½

To say that The Goldfinch is a good book, now, feels rather superfluous. Everyone has already read it and written about it and the most surprising thing is that it took me so long to read it. But its size was daunting and I’m always slightly put off by a book during its moment of high fashion, when it crowds in on you from every bestseller table and ‘must read’ list. This weekend, having to take two unplanned cross-country train journeys, I grabbed the closest thing to hand that would get me through four hours of the British rail network. That just happened to be a dogeared copy of The Goldfinch that I’d snaffled from the informal lending library at work.

Continue reading →

The Story of a New Name (2012): Elena Ferrante

5 Comments
Nothing would delight me more than being able to give you a picture of Elena Ferrante, but it’s a pseudonym and no one knows who she is

★★★★ ½

The Neapolitan Novels: Book II

The first installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels moved me deeply and there was no doubt I’d continue with the series. For various reasons this week has been challenging and so yesterday afternoon, on a whim, I bought the second book and have spent a few hours here and there absorbed afresh in Ferrante’s compelling world, by turns painfully familiar and shockingly alien. As in the first novel, the characters have a presence and reality which means one can’t comfortably dismiss them as fictional. Once again, this book has the charge of thinly fictionalised autobiography: nostalgic, fearless and merciless, a forensic dissection of the anatomy of friendship.

Continue reading →

My Brilliant Friend (2011): Elena Ferrante

8 Comments
Nothing would delight me more than being able to give you a picture of Elena Ferrante, but it’s a pseudonym and no one knows who she is

★★★★

About a month ago, several people recommended that I should read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Then my local bookshop devoted a window display to her, so it seemed a good time to plunge in. The novels follow the friendship between two women, the narrator Elena and Raffaella, whom Elena calls Lila. Throughout the course of the series I imagine we’ll cover most of the second half of the 20th century, but this first book sets the scene with the story of their childhood and adolescence in a modest, run-down suburb of Naples.

Continue reading →

A Tale for the Time Being (2013): Ruth Ozeki

1 Comment

★★★★

It’s been a long time (for me) since I read a novel: the last few months have been more conducive to dipping in and out, and not really getting anywhere with anything. And so on Saturday I went on a day trip out of London, left my tablet and my phone behind, and took a book for the journey. Being alone with the book for that length of time was exhilarating: for the first time in weeks I became dragged into another world and I spent the rest of Saturday and Sunday reading. For, if it’s been a long time since I read a novel at all, it’s been even longer since I read the kind of novel that, on finishing, elicited a strangled half-yowl of frustration – not at the book itself, but at the knowledge that I just don’t have the depth of understanding in order to appreciate all the clever stuff that I’m sure is going on in there.

Continue reading →

The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (2002): Giles Waterfield

2 Comments

★★★

This was one of my Christmas presents and my mother confessed to having had qualms about buying it. It came strongly recommended by a family friend who thought it’d be just up my street, but, “It’s just not the kind of book you read,” said Mum, evidently concerned at the lack of a historical setting, duels, court intrigue, vast battle scenes or Vikings of any form. Fortunately I thought it was great fun. (Thanks Mum and Dad!)

Continue reading →

Uncle Rudolf (2002): Paul Bailey

1 Comment

★★★½

At a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, I ended up sitting next to another keen reader. He listened indulgently to my pitch about why he should go and read Dorothy Dunnett right now, and then not only made a recommendation of his own but actually gave me the book there and then. I’ve always thought it’s rather brave to do that after only a couple of hours’ acquaintance, but since I’d also mentioned the whole Baroque opera side of things, he said he thought I’d click with this. And he was right. I picked it up the other night, when I had a little time before going to bed and, to my surprise, simply couldn’t put the book down until I’d finished it. It isn’t all that long – 184 pages – and its atmosphere draws you into an elegiac bubble of a world which is best savoured all in one go.

Continue reading →