Dear Julián, Tomb Song, tr. Christina MacSweeney (2018. Original: Canción de tumba, 2011) is an elegiac account of a writer who tries to reconcile himself both with a troubled past and with a present marked by imminent loss. We follow a mourning trajectory that begins with the narrator’s personal crisis – triggered by his mother’s illness – and…
Tag: Midlife Crisis
Trust is fine, but control is better
Dear Elfriede, Your novel The Piano Teacher, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (1988. Die Klavierspielerin, 1983) is vile and uncompromising: it dwells on the grotesque, crossed by an undercurrent of violence that, by striping everything of fineries and superficial niceties, almost acts as a cleansing element. The novel centres around Erika Kohut (Erika K.), a piano teacher…
To disentangle true from false
Dear Delphine, Based on a True Story (2017, tr. George Miller. Original: D’aprés une histoire vraie, 2015) is an atmospheric book that revolves around a woman who may or may not have been taken hostage by another – and by her readers. The narrator is a middle-aged woman who lives in Paris with her two…
That indefinitely extended requirement that one human being makes upon another
Dear Iris, “I think it’s terrible to be in danger of writing a philosophical novel”, you said in an interview. And I know you have systematically refused to be called a philosophical novelist. However, may I politely disagree? Anatole Broyard attributes to you the idea that good art is philosophy swimming, or philosophy drowning. I could not trace…
A small tear in the fabric of reality
Dear Nicole, Most of the time, we tend to think of fiction as a mirror held up, facing reality. Never mind if this is a clear mirror, a cloudy or an openly distorted one – our gaze rarely changes direction. Some books, however, attempt to cross through the looking-glass: they direct our gaze away from…
Don’t ever wait for the swallows,
Dear Larissa, Your short story collection Swallow Summer, translated by Lyn Marven (2016. Originally, Schwalbensommer, 2003) made me think of tracks made of air: we might know they have just been travelled by birds, but we cannot trace back the moment immediately before their departure, or the very first movement of their wings. Your stories felt…
Nostalgia was like a vine, strangling her, sickly scented
Review: The Flesh of the Peach, by Helen McClorey
Look at the colour of it
Dear Ali, It takes us only a few paragraphs of Autumn (2016) to recognize your characteristic marks: experimental writing; a collage of literary references; a narrative propelled through voice and voice alone; a narrative that mingles past and present, as if they were one thing, happening at once; and, finally, the creative reframing of contemporary…
She sensed a scream beneath the silence,
Review: The Beautiful Bureaucrat, by Helen Phillips
Dear Helen,
It is difficult to pin down your novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015): a dystopia that reads like a thriller with brief incursions into horror, literary modernism and satire? It’s hard to say. But, by trying too much, and rushing to the tidy end, it might have fallen short of being great in any of these categories.
It was the memory of a memory by now—the hallmark of happiness, that scene
Review: In a Summer Season, by Elizabeth Taylor
herself held underwater by her hair, snared around auburn-rusted anchor chains
Dear Margaret, As I was reading your novel The Fire-Dwellers (1969), I had the feeling of having been caught in the middle of a conflagration, a large fire, difficult to get through. There is smoke everywhere, and the reality of the surroundings seems to have gone into flames. As much as your protagonist, we seem…
The taste of the fog was at the back of their throats
Dear Elizabeth, Do you know this feeling we have when we quite unexpectedly understand why a particular book is a classic? When we understand what it means; when we suddenly get to know what it feels like. Have you ever felt it? When a book draws from a tradition it so thoroughly understands that it…
Shut the noise out with your own noise
Dear Patricia, WHILE READING your novel Deep Water (1957), I felt as if you had gradually thrust us into the muddy waters of your protagonist’s troubled mind. The book is narrated in third person through the perspective of Vic Van Allen, an inhibited man in his late thirties, who runs a small press in the…
material things could be altered by the light, or the absence of light, in which you looked at them
Dear Tessa, I felt as if I was entering this house, too, along with your characters – the old country house where your novel The Past (2015) is set. It is musty, cold, and it needs repairs which none of the four siblings who inhabit the story can really afford. They will spend a last…
She looks at him and feels happy, but the happiness is heavy
Dear Mary, Each of the women who inhabit your new collection of stories, Always Happy Hour (2017), is different in her own small way – and yet all of them seem to merge into each other in the end. Most of the stories are told in first-person narration by a woman in her late-twenties or…
each day for almost everyone in the world was a capitulation at some point
Dear Elizabeth, The Simple Truth (1955) can be a deceptively slim novel, one whose stories are structured like a set of Russian matryoshkas, each doll hidden inside one another: by the end of the book, we come to a truth very different from the one we were searching for at the beginning. Yet, somehow, those…
Calling into empty rooms
Dear Emma, Your most recent novel, Modern Lovers (2016), peopled with aging hipsters and angsty teenagers, makes for a breezy summer read. The novel is set in Brooklyn and centers around two middle age couples and their teenage kids’ summer affair. Back in the 80’s, when Elizabeth, Andrew and Zoe were at university, they formed…
The epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words
Dear John, In your novel Stoner (1965), we follow the trajectory of the eponymous character, a university professor who finds himself stuck in an unsuccessful marriage and in a career without great prospects. William Stoner, protagonist of the novel, was born in the late nineteenth century Missouri, into a family of poor peasants. He entered,…
