"There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking then remorse"

In my experience there are books that you tell your friends you "couldn't put down" and then there are those that you simply, and physically, can't. This is one of those books. From the moment I turned the first page I was hooked into this curious story about murder, deception and revenge.

Ian McEwan's Nutshell is a part adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet; the Prince of Denmark  in this case is an unborn child and the narrative is delivered from within the confines of the womb. Don't worry, our narrator is trustworthy, highly intelligent with a brutal wit gathering what he does through overheard conversations between his mother and scheming Uncle, listening in to Radio 4 and an intuition far beyond that usually credited to a baby.   

Readers will either love or hate this novel depending on their willingness to accept the central conceit. For me, McEwan does an expert, I'd go as far as masterly, job of adapting a classic text in such a unique way. There is simply nothing lost but everything to gain in the telling of the story through the eyes of an unborn baby.

I easily empathised with the narrator and at times read and then reread certain passages, just because, "We're alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious developments".

Other reviews will, no doubt, be less generous in praise for Nutshell; "is this some kind of joke?" I can hear the book groups gasp "Its just a gimmick" but for me this is writing that makes you sit up, commit to the story and let the World around you slip into a haze. Nothing else matters when you're reading, just suspend your disbelief and read. Even better, find a few space hours and read it all in one go.

I read this novel in hardback, in part, on the train in South East London

Nutshell by Ian McEwan, published by Vintage, 210 pages

"The history of any country begins in the heart of a man or a woman"

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by Willa Cather which has been recently republished as part of Penguin Classics' Pocket Penguin series. Now, I'm not known for reviewing classics as such in this blog but I am a fan of The Happy Reader who have selected O Pioneers! as their book for Autumn, so I'm in.

Willa Cather's first great plains saga O Pioneers is set in the heart of the Nebraskan frontier at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The story hangs on strong willed and fiercely independent Alexandra Bergson who is given a farm to manage by her death-bed father in the fictional small town of Hanover, Nebraska. At only 16 years old Alexandra must manage a brutally subsistence way of life for her family whilst other's around her abandon the town after drought and disastr.

Despite the harshness depicted in the novel there are love affairs and occasional rays of hope which lift the novel to part romantic pastoral. The fact that this novel continues to be celebrated today in adaptations from TV films (1992) to opera (2009) shows a deep connection with the American psyche. Indeed for many Willa Cather is up there with Melville and Steinbeck in the canon of great American writers.

 

Willa Cather was trained as a journalist and at times the novel is more essay than literature but in places Cather shows a softer side; "For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning". In truth the story is more domestic than the title suggests; more cattle rearing than gold rush but perhaps this is Cather's own response to Walt Whitman's poem O Pioneers, O Pioneers?

For me this novel is particularly interesting today with forthcoming presidential elections and an electorate bitterly divided on immigration and social lines. In Cather's novel we find disparate communities struggling to survive in a patchwork landscape of Swedes, French, Irish and English families. Not exactly an easy read but a worthy diversion from the contemporary literary fiction I'm usually pouring over. 

I read this novel in paperback, in part, with a coffee and a pastel de Nata at Shoreditch Grind in East London

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, published by Penguin, 208 pages

"I was there! I saw what you saw, I felt what you felt. As ever. Cora"

The Essex Serpent is the second novel from Sarah Perry and was published earlier this year with reviews in the Sunday Times which hailed it "One of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade. Lofty praise indeed but as a fan of Gothic fiction; from Stoker to Poe and Shelley to Walpole, I was looking forward to getting stuck in.

In Perry's novel we meet recently widowed Cora who leaves London for Essex upon reports that the mysterious 'Essex Serpent' has returned. Initially the serpent is little more than myth from a superstitious rural outpost far from the modernity of the City. Indeed, the novel is brilliantly evocative of the Essex marshes and the spirt in which the Provinces are more often that not portrayed in Victorian fiction.

Cora Seaborne is a strong willed woman with flair, intellect and the ability to influence those around her including young London Doctor Luke Garett. Its her interest in science and geology which initially draws her to the case of the Essex Serpent but its her faith that is ultimately the driving force. Her interest in fossils, and "having her name on the wall in the British Museum" is seemingly stronger than that in her own son Francis but Perry doesn't  explore this quite enough, presumably to make more of the tension built up as locals disappear and sightings of the serpent increase. Regrettebly this tension leads nowhere. 

The best parts of the narrative are told in letter form, this worked brilliantly in Bram Stoker's Dracula as a way to push the story forward. The trouble is that in The Essex Serpent there is simply not enough story.

For me, this is Victorian gothic pastiche. To see how the genre has evolved pick up a copy of David Michell's Slade House which contains all the Gothic tropes and a whole lot more.

I read this novel on Kindle in part in Margate during the weekend of the brilliant Margate Bookie

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, published by Serpent's Tail, 432 pages

"Mr Nakano had screwed up. Not a business mistake. A screw up with women"

Readers of this blog will know that I'm an avid fan of contemporary Japanese literature so its no surprise that this week's review is of The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell.  Kawakami is a leading Japanese author who is popular not only at home but also in translation with novels like the brilliant Strange Weather in Tokyo. For me she is up there with Banana Yoshimoto as one of the most interesting women writers in Asia.

Like Strange Weather, Portobello books have published The Nagano Thrift Shop with cover artwork which includes 'levitating girl' photography by Natsumi Hayashi. If you're not familiar with Hayashi's photography style then check out the link here or on Hayashi's own blog 'Yowayowa camera woman diary' here. For me this is a perfect creative partnership with Kawakami's off-beat fiction and Hayashi's idiosyncratic artwork.

Anyway, back to the novel. The Nagano Thrift Shop is a story about a young woman, Hitomi, who starts to work behind the counter in a traditional neighbourhood second-hand shop owned by the enigmatic Mr Nakano. The narrative is very much Hitomi's but the novel is structured with myriad characters who come and go along with the curios in the shop, each chapter is in fact named after a particular item on sale in the shop e.g. 'Bowl'.

I read the shop itself as a metaphor for an alternative Japan - this is a home for drifters and aesthetes rather than career men or women. The shop itself is in a residential neighbourhood, rather than a downtown business area like Shinjuku, which is interesting for readers of the translated version. Allison Markin Powell does a pretty good job at making sense of some of the cultural references for the English reader.

Hitomi knows little about what she wants in life. Although she is attracted to the delivery driver Takeo, himself a college drop out, their relationship is less than conventional. Both struggle to communicate what they want and build a tentative relationship somewhere between friend and lover.

Other women in the novel such as Mr Nakano's sister and his mistress are stronger and more determined but Hitomi looks on from a distance even when these other women try to befriend her. Like much Japanese fiction this is a novel about identity, loneliness and about non-conformism. With Kawakami's writing raising questions about sex and identity it is no surprise that her novels are so popular in structured, and often formal, Japan. 

This is a great novel and a highly accessible introduction to Japanese fiction.   

I read this novel on Kindle in part in Margate during the weekend of the brilliant Margate Bookie

The Nagano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami, published by Portobello, 256 pages

The summer edit.....

The best books I've read and reviewed this summer. Pick up a copy now before the long bank holiday weekend!

1. Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers

"She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion"

2. Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

"Am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?"

3. Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

"That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself"

"She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion"

The idea of the 'Frontier' in literature is a well used and endlessly compelling device. From classic novels like O Pioneers and White Fang to contemporary science fiction and adventure writing the frontier is alive and well in popular culture. In Eggers' latest novel Heroes of the Frontier the role of the frontier is played by Alaska and is the setting for a unique family road-trip adventure.

Josie is a thirty-eight year old mum who packs up her two kids and sets off from Anchorage in a hired winnebago to rediscover some purpose in life after the breakdown of her relationship with the kids father, "His interest in them came and went, like his passion for economic equality or triathlons", and a pending lawsuit at her dental practice. Josie is strong and determined but ultimately lacking in an actual plan; an imaginative premise for an adventure steeped in despair and black humour.

Modern Alaska shines brilliantly as the wild frontier with Eggers' using an added wild fire to create a landscape of abandoned houses in which the family camp out. Whether Eggers' Alaska is really a utopian bastion of the American dream I don't know but I don't think this novel could be set anywhere else. 

Eggers' prose is accessible and fast paced which keeps the pages turning throughout. The plot is straight forward and simple but so full of empathy that the tension of life as a single parent is captured in every single moment; "The days were like this, each was miles long and had no aim or no possibility of regret".

Dave Eggers is a massively poplar writer with a distinct voice and personality as an author which for me is an important part of understanding any book. I read this book knowing about Eggers' own experience essentially raising his younger brother after the death of their parents. To that end its hard to distinguish where the narrative in the novel becomes the story of the author and the book is all the better for it. 

I read this novel on Kindle in part in the gardens outside Tate Modern's new Switch House. 

Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers, published by Penguin, 400 pages

"Am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?"

Honestly, it was the striking image on the cover of this book that really grabbed my attention. Amongst all the table top displays of 'summer reads' there was something about the isolation of the girl in the photograph that made the book stand apart.

Booker shortlisted author Deborah Levy's novel Hot Milk concerns Sophie, a twenty something woman who moves from West London to southern Spain to look after her dependant mother who is undergoing treatment for a mysterious illness at a private clinic. Sophie is an anthropology graduate whose academic skills are not exactly being put to use in her job as a barista in West London. Instead her curiosity is channeled into understanding her own relationship with her sick and controlling mother and distant and estranged father.

We first meet Sophie as a young lifeguard, Juan, administers emergency treatment when she is stung by a jelly fish. Sophie's wounds are treated at various times in the novel by different hands dependent upon her need to connect with the people around her. Turning at times to both Juan and Ingrid, a German woman 'whose body is long and hard like an autobahn"; both relationships reflect the loneliness at the heart of the character. 

Characters come and go in the novel but it is this loneliness that really resonated to me in Levy's writing. Here is a character torn between duty to her mother and and over riding need to escape her own confines. The scorching heat of southern Spain and the burning sores of her jelly fish stings raise the tension to an unbearable level.

I really enjoyed this novel with its rich metaphors, repeating visual motifs (such as the greek mythology inspired medusa and starry apple desktop skies) and locations that subverted the standard Mediterranean holiday settings. From the creepy marble clad clinic in Almeria to the urban heave of Syntagma Square in Athens, this couldn't be further from the glossy images in the holiday brochures.

I read this novel on Kindle in part in Hyde Park at the Serpentine Gallery's summer pavilion. 

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, published by Penguin, 220 pages

"Already he'd become an expert in female sadness"

Where to go after last week's claustrophobic and chilling Icelandic crime drama 'Snowblind'? The heat of free spirited California couldn't be further removed! Emma Cline's debut novel is set mostly in California in the late 1960's and concerns a young girl, Evie, whose obsession with a group of girls leads her to a ranch where a collective family, of sorts, live together in a commune. Sounds familiar? The Girls is certainly inspired to some degree by the notorious case of the 'Manson family murders' and their cult leader Charles Manson.

But to say that the novel is a straight fictional account of the Manson case is to do Emma Cline a disservice for The Girls is a coming-of-age tragedy with more than a nod to Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides.

The bright and over exposed image on the cover of the UK hard-back edition makes The Girls an inevitable summer read for anyone trawling the better book stores on the high street. This cover perfectly evokes the sun drenched California setting about which Cline so articulately writes. The prose on each page is crisp and arid with the faintest fragrance of a burnt joss stick.  

The narrative is told in flashback from the point of view of an older Evie who looks back to the summer of '69 and a time when she was closer than most will ever be to the kind of sensational headlines that define a generation. Evie is and was an outsider who exists on the fringes of other peoples joy and loss. Although she opens up at times Evie will always be a closed book drawn to the enigma of other people.

I was pretty hooked for two thirds of this novel, these are the parts that deal with Evie's discovery of the girls, her induction to the ranch and early relationship with Russell (the supposed Manson character).  Cline expertly builds believable characters without a hint of cliche but the trouble with the novel is that the final chapters fly by without the perfect pacing on the earlier parts. There is a unnecessary rush to resolve the story which might be to avoid too much comparison with the Manson murders. Or perhaps Evie's distance from events at the ranch is ultimately a dead end in narrative terms?

In any case The Girls is a great debut from a new writer who having already had work published in the Paris Review and Granta will be around to stay.

I read this novel on Kindle in July 2016 in the sun at home in Oxfordshire

The Girls by Emma Cline, published by Vintage, 368 pages

"The red stain was like a scream in the silence"

Coming off the back of my unexpected first foray into the work of Anne Tyler I needed something darker, something more enigmatic to complete my summer holiday reading list; so it was time to delve back into the Icelandic crime genre. Having previously read and and reviewed Ragar Jonasson's novel Night Blind, the second in the Dark Iceland series, this time I'm right at the beginning with Snow Blind.

Snow Blind is the first time we meet Jonasson's protagonist Ari Thor, the new guy in town having been sent from Reykjavik to work with the police department in remote town Sigluffjordur. Thor is an outsider which translator Quentin Bates makes work well in translation for us readers discovering Icelandic idiosyncrasies for the first time.

In this novel Ari Thor finds himself investigating the case of a barely conscious young woman left bleeding in the snow and a death amongst the members of the local amateur dramatic society. This is classic Midsomer territory, a middle-class microcosm of unassuming characters, but scratch beneath the surface and you'll find the kind of secrets and untruths that the Nordic Noir genre dishes out in spades. With the town cut off from the outside world after an avalanche the story takes on a chilling twist that you simply couldn't find in other less accomplished crime fiction.

Jonasson's skill is taking the conventions of the crime writing genre and layering on top a uniquely Icelandic quality. In this case its the idea of claustrophobia that Jonasson plays on so well. Firstly in the setting, not only is Iceland a small and relatively isolated island but Siglufjordur is on the remote northern coast. Even within the town the story is set within a small and intense group of people. Secondly its the weather which adds a suffocating and smothering feeling as the snow comes down to blanket everything. Ari Thor could easily be stifled by the asphyxiating nature of the town but through a mixture of faith and leading man (Thor like) heroics he prevails. The third in the Dark Iceland series is out soon and I, for one, can't wait. 

There is something beautifully perverse in reading a novel set in the Icelandic Winter whilst basking in 30 degree Mediterranean sunshine but isn't that what fiction is all about? 

I read this novel in paperback in July 2016 by the pool in Dubrovnik, Croatia

Snow Blind by Ragnar Jonasson (translated by Quentin Bates), published by Orenda Books, 300 pages

"It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how its all going to end"

I'd planned my summer holiday reading list with extreme care and precision seeking out the titles that I'd hope would suit seven lazy days on the sun. What I hadn't planned for was my kindle crashing out on day 3 - aaaarrrgh!!! Note: Don't leave e-books in direct sunlight, they don't like it :(

I'd packed two paperbacks, and a quick read from The School of Life, but that wasn't going to last a week so I was forced to take emergency measures. Luckily there was a stack of pre-read paper backs in a shady corner of the pool bar just waiting to be picked up. My choice consisted of:

A copy of yesterday's New York Times
Das Perfect Opfer by Gillian Flynn
Eine Kurze Geshichter von fast allem by Bill Bryson
Verschworung by David Lagerkranz
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler 

Needless to say, five minutes later I was back on my sun-bed with my first Anne Tyler. Straight of the back of Hotel du Lac I had been looking forward to something more virile, brawny even, yet here I was about to delve in to a multi-generational American family saga.

A Spool of Blue Thread is epic in its portrayal of a single family, the Whitshanks, across a number of generations. Tyler eases us in gently, the start of the novel is set in contemporary Baltimore and begins tightly with parents Red and Abby and their four grown up kids. The story plods along with occasional tangents that dial in and out on specific characters back stories largely based around the family home itself. 

At times the rabbit holes are gripping, such as the parts about youngest son Stem, but most times you're left wanting a whole lot more. Eldest son Denny is the most interesting character yet we never get chance to read his real backstory.

Some of the prose is touching; "But still, you know how it is when you're missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for" but other times its all a bit too civil for my taste. Even the rows and fights are well-bred and courteous. 

Anne Tyler is without doubt an accomplished story teller and reading more of her work I'm sure I'd come to understand her idiosyncrasies  For me, this is a rather polite and only partly engrossing summer read but If I was reading this at home in inevitably shorter bursts I'm not sure I'd be able to keep going. The early chapters are strongest but once the story delves back too far in time the narrative unravels. The problem here is knowing when to stop. These characters are clearly very personal to Anne Tyler and I suspect she could continue to write the Whitshank saga for ever. Despite my misgivings I am glad I've read Anne Tyler in a reading list curve ball kinda way. 

I read this novel in paperback in July 2016 by the pool in Dubrovnik, Croatia

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler, published by Vintage, 482 pages

"That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself "

Having just finished Yoko Ogawa's weird and macabre Hotel Iris for my next read I'm checking into another out of season hotel, this time the Hotel du Lac. This 1984 Booker Prize winning novel has been reissued this summer by Penguin with a beautiful cover image which screams summer read. At only 193 pages could this book be the perfect sun-bed companion? I had to find out.

The novella concerns an unlikely named romantic fiction writer, Edith Hope, who is sent to the Hotel du Lac on the shores of Lake Geneva to "disappear for a decent length of time and come back older, wiser and properly sorry". Quite what sort of scandal has seen Edith sent away from London you'll have to be patient to find out. To be honest, I didn't connect with Edith as such; her general moping and social insecurities are just annoying but for her expert perception of the other hotel guests she can be forgiven - she is a writer after all. 

The setting of the out of season hotel is a clever technique used by Brookner to great effect. What sort of person has the time or inclination to check into a faded old lady of a residence long after the sun has set? There are a hundred stories here about the overheard dining room conversations and eccentric guests propping up the bar but Brookner instead focuses on Edith's relations with a small number of guests. This scratching the surface could have resulted in shallow stereotypes but instead we discover a wonderful cast of supporting characters, such as Mme de Bonneuil and Mrs Pusey, who leave Edith questioning her own identity.

Very little actually happens at the Hotel du Lac and the book is all the more compelling for it. From my view on a hotel sun-bed with full sight of my fellow guests I practiced by own skills of perception - yes this is a past-time not just reserved for middle class ladies! Ultimately this is a very British book about style through the eyes of someone banished from town for her own breach of etiquette. But don't think this is prosaic or out of date, Anita Brookner's literary style is absolutely relevant today.

I finished this book in almost one sitting, the odd dip in the pool the only interruption, and I'd recommend reading this book in a similar way.

I read this novel in paperback in July 2016 by the pool in Dubrovnik, Croatia

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, published by Penguin, 193 pages