What I read: October
Ghost Music - An Yu
Song Yan wakes up to a mushroom speaking to her from across the room. It’s a small orange mushroom that has grown in the doorway of her bedroom. It seems unsettlingly wise. And so begins the strange journey of Ghost Music; a jumble of storylines that even now, days after finishing, I still feel confused about. It’s an interesting mix of dream and reality, all relayed in An Yu’s direct, sparse style.
Song Yan’s life keeps getting caught on the past. When her mother-in-law moves into the apartment she shares with her husband, Bowen, Song Yan learns that Bowen has been keeping secrets from her - a whole past she is a stranger to. Song Yan is a piano teacher, but the instrument seems haunted for her; scales and pieces bring memories of learning to play as a child rushing to the surface. For a relatively short book, the story takes many turns, blurring the past and the present, dipping into the unreal. And yet, it seemed listless to me - I felt I never really reached the heart of the book, the point of all these strange moments.
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
I went into The Corrections with such high expectations. I had just finished White Teeth and wanted to continue with the chunky family sagas, so picked this up off the back of all its glowing recommendations. Perhaps I missed something - I just couldn’t understand what other people were enjoying so much. It’s often categorised as a funny novel, but I struggled to feel anything other than desperately sad for these characters, let alone laugh at them.
The Corrections encloses you within the Lambert family from the Midwest - there’s Edith and Albert, and their three grown children: Chip, Gary and Denise. The plot moves between different time periods, perspectives and locations but roughly follows the difficulties the family is facing as Albert’s health rapidly declines and Edith desperately tries to get everyone together for one last Christmas. You can’t fault Franzen’s character work - these are intensely detailed, lifelike characters with deep-rooted habits and interesting relationships to each other. I think I simply found them unlikeable. And again, that’s nothing against Franzen’s writing, I think creating believably unlikeable characters is a real skill, but their selfish, stubborn and frustrating traits were increasingly exhausting to read about. And they were all so privately sad - so locked inside their own loneliness that it became depressing to witness. I could see was no sense of future in the narrative, nothing propelling this story forward, just a series of arguments between family members that went back and forth, never reaching a resolution. Often it felt like I too was stuck there at the kitchen table whilst everyone fought, unsure when this would end so I could leave the room and get on with my evening.
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
How to even sum up White Teeth? This is a novel in the purest, most enjoyable sense. A sprawling, propulsive, (at times, even slightly ridiculous) story that pulls you along on this incredible journey. The fact that this was Smith’s debut (published when she was only 24) is a sobering fact - what an achievement to have White Teeth under your belt before your mid 20s are even over…
The story opens in north-west London, 1975, with Archie Jones attempting to take his own life. Luckily for us though, fate has decided Archie’s story isn’t destined to end with the windows rolled up in a car outside the Halal butchers, and Smith plunges us into the lives of Archie and his best friend, Samad Iqbal. Samad and his wife, Alsana, are Bangladeshi immigrants. Archie’s wife, Clara, is also an immigrant, having moved to London from Jamaica with her mother when she was a child. And so begins the intertwined tale of these two families - from a friendship started during the war, we watch as the Iqbals and the Jones lay their roots in this corner of London, and as their children grow up, form their own connections to this city and decide what kind of people they want to be.
White Teeth is primarily a story of identity, about personal histories and who and what will shape them. Clara, Samad and Alsana are first-generation immigrants - they are constantly considering what it means to have left the place you are from. Their children, on the other hand, were born here, and want to be shaped by this city in a way that often clashes with their parents’ ideals. Can you look to the future, without being held back by the past? As is probably clear, I loved re-discovering White Teeth this month. I was completely swept up by its narrative voice, by this messy and contradictory collection of characters. I think it’s a masterclass in great storytelling.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
This is a gorgeous mix of dark and weird - set in remote community in Poland, the story is enclosed by a bleak cold, as snow blocks the road in and out of this town and everything feels suspended in an ominous chill. The book follows Janina, a local woman who is drawing her own conclusions about the recent series of strange murders that are plaguing the town. Whilst most of the men of the town enjoy hunting, this past time appears to be coming back to haunt them, as each of the hunters turn up dead, apparently killed by the animals they themselves had been pursuing. The intertwined relationship between human and animal is at the heart of this novel, as Tokarczuk asks the reader to consider where the lines between person and beast blur, and how we can justify violence. What are the differences between these crime scenes and the blood-soaked snow following a hunt?
This is one of the Fitzcarraldo books that has made the rounds on social media, and for good reason - Tokarczuk writes with a dark humour that really brings Janina to life. It’s a different and interesting take on a crime thriller / murder mystery type tale - a chilly literary classic.