It’s been a while since I last had a tally up of new books – at least, it feels like a while and I sincerely hope it is, given the number I seem to have acquired.
In paper form, there is: Judith Hermann’s We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, a book of autofiction I’m very excited about. The blurb says it melds psychology, writing and friendship, ‘reflecting on when life becomes fiction, how dependable memory can be, and how close one’s dreams come to reality.’ Conversations with Rilke, by Maurice Betz, is the memoir of Rilke’s French translator, who knew him well in his later life. I’ve been waiting for this to come out for months, but a first flick through the pages makes me a little nervous about the writing style. I hope it isn’t ponderous. Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling, a collection of essays I’ve given to several people but don’t own a copy of myself. The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer, in which Dyer explores the ‘late achievements of a variety of writers, painters, athletes and musicians.’ I’ve enjoyed Dyer’s essays before and these look intriguing and, it must be said, structurally unhinged. And finally Business as Usual, by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, an epistolary novel about a young woman running the library in a thinly disguised Selfridges in the 1930s. It was a recommendation from both Susan and Jacqui that looked irresistible
In digital form I have:
Most of these will be familiar to book bloggers, I think. The Kate van der Borgh is a bit out of my comfort zone, genre-wise, but it’s set in Cambridge and I’m a sucker for novels in my home town. Careless People attracted me because of the effort Facebook’s lawyers put into trying to suppress it. And Fierce Appetites continues my interest in memoir writing, especially as this is by an Irish academic who specialises in Medieval literature. A brief review of it really caught my eye; it said ‘The next time I feel mildly embarrassed about bumping into my student in my gym kit, I will remember this young lady and her threesomes and problems with drinking.’ It made me laugh. I’m terrible about reading books in translation and at reading diversely and so when I saw the winner of the International Booker Prize as a deal of the day, I decided to try it. Sarah Manguso I’ve read before and admired, and Anna Hope I’ve never read before, but have seen her much admired.
The majority of these are recent publications and I’m hoping I’ll do better with them than some of the other new(ish) releases I’ve tried recently.
This sounded so attractive that I used a monthly Audible credit on it. The book is a series of linked essays by the obituary writer for The Economist. She is also, apparently, a poet and a biographer. The general idea, I think, is to consider how we capture life on the page, using material from her own long and illustrious career. I didn’t get very far with this at all, in fact, I haven’t actually managed to finish listening to the first essay. It’s just a splurge of details, with the author waxing lyrical about tiny artifacts or views of a person’s house or… well I can’t really recall because it all merged into one. I didn’t know where it was going or what it wanted to say and I found myself completely lost in the weeds. I find listening to books requires more effort than reading them, and a lot of the effort goes in hanging onto details while I fit them into the overarching plot. The plot creates the easy container and without it, the experience dissolved into a stream of tiny component parts that failed to create something larger than their sum. I feel bad about this book and in theory would like to try it again, starting on the second essay. But so far, I haven’t gone anywhere near it and I may have to assume my interest in it has died.
This was another disappointment. I’d never read Rachel Joyce, fearing that her books would be a bit sentimental for me. But this had an intriguing premise. It’s a dysfunctional family story that concerns the four grown children of popular artist, Vic Kemp. He’s a sort of Jack Vettriano clone, who has made a lot of money but craves critical acclaim. His wife died shortly after the birth of his fourth child, and the family has muddled along ever since, becoming this unusually tight and self-enclosed tribe. The novel opens as Vic announces to his offspring that he’s found the love of his life in a twentysomething influencer called Bella Mae, and he intends to marry her. This announcement blindsides his children in a way that seems remarkably excessive and they spend the next three hours (yes, this was another audiobook) discussing how awful it is and how much they love each other and how co-dependent they all are, and we get an absolute ton of back story anecdotes provided as evidence. Finally we get some plot: Vic marries his girlfriend at his fancy villa in Italy without telling anyone, and then is found dead. Cue children rushing out to Italy in states of horror and shock that they introspect a LOT about. By this point, my life was beginning to feel very short. I returned the book.
Happily this was just a 99p Kindle bargain that I took a punt on because I thought the cover was so attractive. And of course, the memoir angle again. Stroud has apparently written several memoirs and this is her fourth, I think. This book is all about the meaning of home – in this case the Ridgeway in Wiltshire, near to the extraordinary white horse carved into the landscape – as Stroud and her five children face the prospect of moving to America. Stroud’s husband, Pete, has some sort of important job that means he spends the vast majority of his time traveling abroad, and he has come to the decision that the family needs to settle in Washington, where he’ll be able to be more present. Clover is torn between wanting to spend more time with her husband, and the recognition that she is deeply attached to her home and the surrounding countryside. And besides, she’s spent the past six years bringing up the kids by herself, and there’s resentment here, inevitably, that grows with this peremptory seeming demand. I ought to have enjoyed this, but once again, the sheer wordiness of the prose – repeatedly described in many reviews I read as ‘fluid prose’ – defeated me. I accepted that the first chapter might linger over descriptions of the area and the relationship between Stroud and Pete, as a certain scene-setting might be necessary. But as I ploughed through the second chapter, in which Clover takes the kids to a nearby fair for the day, the pages of lyrical description about a field ground me down. I did look at the reviews online for this one and they are mostly full of fervent admiration, so don’t let me dissuade you. I think I just have to accept that the inner landscape of people interests me a great deal more than the outer landscape does.