Review round-up, June 2023

Here are brief reviews of books I read since January and put into the Fortnightly newsletter, excluding those I wrote about at length, which can be seen on my general books page.

The Colony by Audrey Magee

is set on an island off the Irish coast in 1979. It opens with Lloyd, an English artist, being rowed perilously to the place he has chosen for his work for three months; before long, Masson, a French academic and regular visitor, appears. Their interactions with each other and with the locals reveal ideas about language, power, art and entitlement.

The novel rattles along, the narrative punctuated by factual accounts of murders in the Northern Ireland Troubles (they seem calculated and disconnected, an attempt to give the story ballast). In the end, for me it didn't quite pull together, but it was still interesting

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Catton was the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize (for The Luminaries, aged 28 in 2013). So it’s not surprising that her new novel is being billed as a ‘literary' thriller. I’m not sure what ‘literary’ really means there, but it’s certainly a thriller, and it’s well-written, and I enjoyed it in a couple of days, even if it's unlikely to trouble prize judges this time.

It tells the story of the eponymous ‘guerrilla gardening collective’ in New Zealand, and their catastrophic coming together with an Elon Musk-Peter Thiel type American billionaire, who seems to be building a survival bolthole in the countryside. She is funny on the pompous self-absorption of the activists, and there is a lot of skilfully marshalled technology on show (drones, internet tracking). By the way, ‘Birnam Wood’ is the name of the collective, and it’s a side-track for anyone who expects a Shakespearean angle.

Claire Keegan

has a new book coming out in the autumn, and again it's very slim: 'So Late in the Day' is a story that was published (like Foster) in the New Yorker last year, and you can now read it there, or listen to Keegan read it to you.

It's not at the level of Foster or Small Things Like These (my book of 2021), but whatever she writes is never less than interesting. This time, instead of the sympathetic male protagonists of those two stories, we have Cathal, an unappealing man whose engagement broke up (you can see why).

Other Keegan things from me:

She visited our school and spoke about Foster (the single most-visited page on my site).
STLT compared to Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves, very different books that also have a deep connection.
A piece on the cover of STLT after a visit last November to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (the Bruegel room).

The Stasi Poetry Circle by Philip Oltermann

This looks at East Germany from an unusual angle - the monthly meetings of a group of agents who come together to learn how to write poetry. Visiting Berlin, I am struck by the fact that many people walking around the streets doing their shopping must once have worked for the Stasi: if you were 25 when the Berlin Wall came down, you are not even 60 now.

Coincidentally, the Rest in History podcast with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talked the other day to Katja Hoyer, historian and author of the new book Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990, which has gone straight on the to-read list. It's an absorbing conversation, with Hoyer providing the colour and nuance which is often missing in images of the GDR.

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Northern Ireland in the Troubles, like East Germany, is a world both recent and seemingly well behind us. The marking of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement reminded us of so much. Louise Kennedy's novel has been hugely successful, and I read it during the holidays: the pleasing clarity of her style drives the story on. In some ways it feels old-fashioned, harking back to ground covered in the past by writers like Bernard MacLaverty and David Park.

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

The serial killer novel has become a well-worn genre in recent years. Danya Kukafka pulls it apart: the emphasis here is on the women left in the aftermath of Ansel Packer rather than the killer's brutality. His mother, his wife's twin sister and the detective hunting him down (who once was in care with him) are centred, though Packer himself punctuates the story as the clock ticks down from 12 hours to zero (eventually he is seen as pathetic rather than brilliant).

In that sense, the book doesn't have quite the daring of the Danish television series The Investigation, starring the sensational Søren Malling, which excised the killer almost totally from the narrative. But it is still a gripping and compelling story.

Mother of Flip-Flops by Mukahang Limbu

Limbu is a highly-accomplished young poet, originally from Nepal, now at Oxford. His first slim collection, demonstrates how confidently he writes, and how formally daring he can be.

In 2019, he won the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry for his poem 'The Cleaners', now in this book, in which it still stands out: dedicated to 'My Mother Rina Limbu, and the Housekeepers of Malmaison, And the World', it sends us into a world most of us take for granted and ignore, of those who clean our hotel rooms, the titles of which head the parts of the sequence, like

HONEYMOON SUITE:

We are the cleaners eating dust we pick up

dead skim in lumps along the inch of our fingers

the scene of leftover breakfast pastries on our uniform

rub against our moist armpits like washboards we reach

up to spread the sheets out wide like the

outside sky shaking out their dirty stars

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio is one of my favourite paintings, and luckily it is on permanent (and free) show just a few miles away, in the National Gallery of Ireland. I recently caught up with Jonathan Harr's account of its re-discovery.

It's a racy read, and certainly not an academic art history account. The first part follows the Italian art history academics Francesca Cappelletti and Laura Testa as they tried to track down the painting's journey through history; the second part records the famous discovery by Sergio Benedetti in the Jesuit House in Leeson Street, Dublin, amazingly only a few minutes from the NGI.

My post on the painting and King Lear.

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland

This is a truly compelling book, which I raced through. Freedland tells the story of Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg) who in 1944 with his companion Alfréd Wetzler became the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and got the awful news out to the world in their report.

When we start the book we know that they will succeed, but it is still a completely thrilling story. Then there is also the utter horror: I've read quite a few books on the Holocaust, but Freedland's account of day to day life in Auschwitz told me so much that was new to me, and really brought home again the monstrous evil self-regard of those who thought they had the right to treat other human beings so terribly.

Post-escape, the book tells the story of the report's journey to public gaze, and Vrba's never-ending determination to tell the truth. As a young man Freedland first learned about Vrba from his appearance in Claude Lanzmann's mammoth documentary Shoah and was convinced that (his) name deserved to stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi, in the first rank of stories that define the Shoah ... perhaps he might escape our forgetfulness, and be remembered.

Freedland has certainly achieved his aim.

Ephemeron by Fiona Benson

Benson is some talent: her book Vertigo and Ghost was my joint poetry book of 2019 along with Roger Robinson's A Portable Paradise.

The ferocity of that earlier book is continued through to Ephemeron, which is in four sections (it's a very capacious collection): ‘Insect Love Poems’, a group of boarding school poems, a short section at the end on the daughter-mother relationship, and the longest, 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', which reminds us of the classical poems in the earlier collection.

Just two examples: the exhilarating sensousness of 'Boarding School Crush #17: Wonderwall', and the devastating thoughts of a mother in 'Dispatches'.

Listen to Andy Miller recommending the book on Backlisted, starting at 8:58. He calls it 'stunning'. He reads 'Dispatches' perfectly at 10:26: get ready to cry.

Darkness by Annie Ernaux and Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse

Christmas indulgences need to be followed by a cleansing of the palate. In the New Year I read two very slim volumes in translation (lovely Fitzcarraldo Editions): I've been making my way through Annie Ernaux since The Years, and of course last year she won the Nobel. I'd been hearing about Jon Fosse, the Norwegian writer who is being mentioned as a possible Laureate, and Aliss at the Fire seemed a good start.

Neither will cheer you up: Darkness is the story of Ernaux's mother's descent into dementia in the 1980s. It's raw, horrendous, brilliant. Aliss is a novella with at its centre Signe, whose husband never returned from his rowboat-trip into a fjord 20 years ago. The prose winds continuously back to previous generations, time compressed in Signe's grief.

As the first reads of 2023, they didn't provide comfort, but they reaffirmed literature's power in addressing truth.

I read the Fosse in one of my favourite reading venues, Café Central in Innsbruck, which I wrote about previously.

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