Good evening!
You’ll be glad to know, I’m sure, that I have had a much more successful reading week after the disaster that was the week before. Quite a successful week all round actually, as I’ve been productive on multiple fronts -- I have almost finished edits on my third (out of four) PhD chapter, and I’ve gotten a good chunk of other writing done. Maybe it has something to do with the eclipse, or maybe I am growing up and learning to manage my time better.
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My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I mentioned last week that I had started Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated by Damion Searls, which is out now with Pushkin Press (this was gifted to me). This was the perfect antidote to reading something terrible, because it was so surreal and full of surprises. As a reminder of its premise, it's about a woman who lives in an isolated Swiss town, keeping up her childhood home. She takes on a lodger known only as ‘the visitor’, someone new to the town and not always described in human terms. I liked how ambiguous Koch kept the visitor, sometimes casting him as a lover, sometimes a child, sometimes an animal, sometimes a metaphor for depression and loneliness. There’s no real use in trying to work out what or who the visitor is; what is important is that he comes to represent, on a multi-faceted lever, all of the things that people who live alone can invite or bring into their domestic spaces, sometimes against their will.
There are some stellar lines in the novel, like ‘I think I’ve finally found a painting in which I can recognize myself’; ‘never again will I prepare an aperitif with delectable regional dishes’; ‘the visitor often comes across like that: like he’s blind but has seen everything’. I think that the form that the novel takes, the shorter chapters and peeks into this woman’s life and psyche, supports Koch’s prose style very nicely, in that the tightness of the structure allows her to be a bit more surreal in what she is presenting and how she presents it. A really enjoyable novel, one I appreciated very much. Perhaps not for everyone, but if you’re looking for something fresh and a bit out there, this is for you.
I then read what will surely be a novel that stays with me for a long time, Take What You Need by Idra Novey (2023). This was very kindly gifted to me by Daunt Books, who seem incapable of publishing a novel that is less than near-perfect. Take What You Need is about two women: one is Leah, a translator who has spent much of her adult life living in South America, and the second is Jean, her estranged stepmother who has not left the rural Appalachian town of her childhood. Jean and Leah have become estranged by circumstance; after Jean left Leah’s emotionally-inept father when Leah was ten, they have kept only the basest, minimum communication as their lives fork down very different paths. Leah is drawn back to Appalachia after Jean’s death, after learning that she has inherited her stepmother’s artwork from a man called Elliot, who has been living with Jean. The chapters alternate between the two women’s viewpoints; Leah’s after Jean’s death and Jean’s in the years before.
To try and summarise what Novey’s novel is ‘about’ is difficult, because it’s about so many things: non-blood family relationships, art and sculpture, Trump’s America, rurality, racism, education and class, Liberal hypocrisy, and the list goes on. This is all distilled into two women’s perspectives over the course of quite a short time, and without ever directly signposting ‘This Is What This Novel Is Trying To Say’, which is no mean feat. What the novel gets so right in its presentation of all of these themes is that they are all extremely complicated and can’t be boiled down to one cause or effect, and yet the solution to living through much of it is to just try and be the best person you can be under the circumstances. Jean is useful in showing us what can happen when you are a bit too naive when doing this, and Leah is useful in showing us what can happen when your sympathy becomes too generalised and can’t translate onto the reality that is in front of you. Even this is complicated by the fact that these two characters actually do raise valid points in their criticisms (or, the criticisms that come to the surface when we follow their narratives) -- Jean allows us to see that giving material help to those in need can impact someone else’s reality, and that everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, but Leah is also right when she points out that there are institutionalised problems when it comes to racism in rural areas and beyond. Novey balances this line extremely well.
I think I was most impressed by how she balances these social issues with Jean’s art, which is arguably at the centre of the novel. Jean is in her 60s and has only recently began making what she calls her ‘Manglements’; rendered metal boxes that have photos that she has found in flea markets enmeshed in their structure, as well as statements in red paint. She has worked in the local hospital all of her life and had few outgoings, so she is able to make her art full time after she has moved back into her childhood home. She primarily uses her father’s tools to do this, a deliberate act of rebellion because he would not let her near them when he was alive, and would scorn her suggestions for making decorative items or flourishes to the practical items that he made. Her work is cathartic, allowing her to chronicle her life and her frustrations when it comes to her former marriage, her relationship with her volatile father and the sadness she feels towards her and Leah’s estrangement. It takes up all of her headspace, until a family moves in next door and she meets Elliot, a young man who is unable to work because of his criminal record. She acts charitably towards Elliot and his mother and sister, allowing them to make use of her water supply after they get cut off and eventually letting Elliot help her with the bigger Manglements. They have a friendship that they both can’t quite define, which comes to a head after a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding feeds into a wider narrative theme about people reading too much or too little into each other, both at an interpersonal level and at a nation-wide social level, and its impact on both of their lives is quite devastating.
To go back to the art that Jean makes, what I loved is that Jean is not concerned about who or what she is doing it for. She just knows that she has to make it now that she has the time and the tools to do so, which is something that so many people do not have access to. She has always been creatively minded, thinking about the form that her art might take long before she starts doing it, but it is this period in her life that really enables her to get going. It is the act of making that is important to the text, and it is only when Leah steps in to take ownership does the question of exhibition come up. I loved this focus on making art for its own sake, because I am a big believer in how creative practise and artistic study does not need to have a career or financial prospects attached to it as a driving factor (although, obviously, I do think the arts are grossly underfunded and that we’re in our current position because what is not deemed profitable or transactional is the first thing to go). Jean’s concerns are logistical and creative, and it really gets you thinking about how many people are starved of making beautiful and interesting things because circumstance does not allow for it.
I’m now reading a book I found in a charity shop that looked interesting, and, happily, is. It’s More Women Than Men by Ivy Compton-Burnett (1933) and so far seems to be about a cast of quite evil gay people. Very enjoyable!
Books on my radar
I’m still a little bit all over the place with what it is I actually want to read, but I have been thinking that this might be the year I dive into Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty (1985), maybe over the summer. I also have another Gavin Lambert novel on the way to me, bought with a voucher I received for Easter, this time The Slide Area (1960).