Good evening!
There was no newsletter last week because I was at an engagement party and then had a busy-ish weekend, so this one will be quite long -- many thoughts on many things, as usual.
Something I’ve been mulling over is the quote that went semi-viral on book twitter, as posted by user @monicabyrne13. She says that she went to see the author John Banville speak, who said that ‘no one read Saul Bellow or Philip Roth anymore’ and that ‘now it’s all young women writing about relationships.’ I hadn’t heard of Banville but I looked him up and found his books looked quite commercial, and his writing did not read as particularly Roth or Bellow-like. Usually I would read something like this and roll my eyes, but because I recently have discovered Roth for myself, and made a distinction between his writing and a lot of writing on the contemporary market, I didn’t feel like I could completely dismiss it. I think that Banville was most likely speaking from a place of misogyny with a disregard for the writing of women, but I do think there is something in there about how a lot of fiction on the Western market now is homogenised, and on the whole very different to the type of prose that appears in something like American Pastoral. I don’t think that ‘no one reads him’ -- since writing about him, I’ve received a lot of messages from people saying that they love him -- I just think that there is a lot of writing that isn’t clearly influenced by him, or comparable to his style. I also think that it’s true that style, on the whole, is not as ‘good’ as it is in Roth’s writing, for reasons I detailed here a couple of weeks ago, and I also think it’s true that bestselling fiction is largely written by women who do, indeed, write about relationships (in the style that I don’t really like). So I do actually think that Banville, whoever he may be, does have a point, but his intent doesn’t sound like it was a sincere criticism. But then again, I wasn’t there and so maybe the context has been skewed by reading it from the unimpressed poster.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I finished Sasha Salzmann’s Glorious People, translated by Imogen Taylor, which is out in February next year with Pushkin Press who kindly gifted it to me. I’m not sure why, but I was surprised by this book, and I enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a family living in Ukraine as the Soviet Union crumbles and eventually falls, and how the original ideals of the nation have come to be skewed. It’s told from multiple perspectives in Ukraine and Germany, from the 1970s until 2015. I absolutely loved the early sections, which charted the childhood of Lena, a girl who looks forward to her summers at her grandmother’s house picking hazelnuts. This comes to an end when she is sent to a Soviet summer camp (Young Pioneer Camp), and she learns what is expected of her as a citizen. Through various events, we learn about the corruption that framed quite ordinary transactions and exchanges in her Ukrainian town, and how this will eventually impact her adult life. I felt that this was the most deftly handled section, and Lena remained the most intriguing character as she tried to navigate some important decisions in her early adulthood.
What I particularly liked was the gesture the novel made towards Chechnya and how Muslim people were and are treated and thought of. I read John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man about a year ago and loved it, which has Chechnya as quite a central location and theme. I think this was when I fully realised how geographically big and diverse Russia is (and the Soviet Union was), and how big some of the cultural differences are within it. This plays quite a big role in the narrative of Glorious People, and creates quite a complex moment of irony when a character makes some comments on Israel near the end. (I can’t really fully go into this without big huge spoilers, soz). Obviously, reading this in the current global context made this scene stand out somewhat, and I actually think Salzmann does something quite genius with it,especially considering Germany’s response to protesting at the minute.
Next I read my first, but certainly not my last, Bolaño in his novella Monsieur Pain (1984). I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to get to him, especially considering how much South American lit I’ve been reading recently. Pain is about a hypnotist living in Paris at the beginning of the second world war, who finds himself sucked into a strange conspiracy involving a hospital patient and two shadowy Spanish figures who seem to be following him around. The text delves into surreal territory the more that Monsieur Pain tries to make sense of the events unfolding around him, which is heavily hinted to be Nazi-ish in nature. It’s astounding that this is only about 130 pages because it felt so multi-layered and rich in its imagery and narrative, which both also leave a lot to the reader.
Next I read Ursula Villareal-Moura’s Like Happiness, which was gifted to me by One and is out in April next year. Unfortunately this one didn’t work for me. The premise is really interesting, but the writing didn’t quite match up to it. It’s about a woman living in Chile in 2015, who is in the process of writing a confession-style letter to a man that defined much of her earlier life after an investigative reporter from the New York Times contacts her for an interview about him. He has been accused of sexual assault, and the reporter is attempting to compile a dossier of other women that have known him over the course of his career as a successful fiction writer. I find the handling of the MeToo movement and accusations against men in power in fiction quite fascinating, even though it’s almost inevitable that it would become the subject of a lot of creative writing because of the cultural impact it has had. As an aside, I think Mary Gaitskill’s This is Pleasure (2019) to be the most successful I’ve read of these texts, in that it is written extremely well, while also providing a new and largely unexplored perspective (that of a woman who chooses not to believe the accusations levelled against her friend).
I think some things were good about Like Happiness, but this was largely conceptual. It is interesting, to me, to read about a woman who reflects on a past relationship and comes to terms with how she was manipulated without fully realising it at the time.This was marred by how the novel wears its themes on its sleeve, and practically shouts to its reader ‘this is what this book is about.’ It also handled some things quite lazily -- for example, there is absolutely not a chance that a writer who has only published one collection of short stories would be as rich or as booked and busy as the author is in this text. There was also a scene in which drug use and an overdose was handled very badly, and generally cheapened anything more interesting that was going on.
I’m now a little way into Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), which I’m completely enthralled by. It’s set in Ethiopia before, during and after Italian invasion and is brilliant at a sentence level, so far. More next week!
Books on my radar
I think I’m going to read Ka Bradley’s The Ministry of Time next and Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta and Valdin, both of which have been gifted to me and highly recommended by trusted sources.
Hey Jess, I love your newsletter and follow it with interest- your recs are often my library list next week. I wanted to finally make a recommendation back to you and that's "Minor Detail" by Adiana Shibli- been all over the press in light of the war, but I read it a few weeks ago and thought it was genuinely brilliant in how well it creates the destabilising and suffocating environment all the characters are operating in. It's really short- only a few hours read. It was really distinctive and I think you'd enjoy.
Can’t wait to read your thoughts on The Shadow King!