Good evening!
Lots of new subscribers this week, hello to you all. Where have you all come from? Hope you all like really erratic reading habits! I like to draw distinctions between things that I have read, and this week I’ve been thinking a lot about structure, which has been an important way into the two novels I read this week.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
In the last newsletter, I mentioned that I had started Vehicle by Jen Calleja, sent to me by Prototype Pubs, out now. I really, really enjoyed it and actually ended up zipping through it -- it was one of those novels that you live inside of and can’t shake the atmosphere off when you’re not reading it.
It is really a story within a story, set in the near-future. The contemporary frameworks the past, as a group of researchers share their knowledge about a certain political period in their near-history. They are all interested in a woman called Heser Heller and the events and people that surrounded her during her youth. She is known as being a double agent, but the reality of this gets questioned as they share and discuss their work. It is presented in vignettes (my fave), made up of letters, memories, fictionalised scenarios, diaries, pieces of research, and countless other forms. I was really impressed with just how many forms Calleja uses without it ever feeling affected.
Heller has been involved in the ‘musik scene’, a kind of resistance form of music, since she was a teenager, and this is what brings a lot of the narrative strands together. There are a lot of interesting aspects of this community that Calleja creates, but by far my favourite was how factory workers made music and indicated this by sewing lyrics and motifs into their skin as tattoos. A kind of unofficial uniform of musikers are aprons, which these factory workers wore during work and then wore while performing -- even if current musikers do not have other jobs, they still wear aprons. Just a really gorgeous image, presented in a way that isn’t meant to be subversive or gory, just a feature of the scene.
One of the main themes of the text is translation, both in an obvious sense (there are translated texts as part of the story), and how we translate historical, cultural and personal artefacts. There is much celebration of the translator, but the novel also drives the point that the personal can’t be removed from it. Hester and her father have both translated the same text, and have come up with very different versions of the same personal narrative of a person that they both knew. This is also highlighted as part of how the researchers ‘translate’ the history of Hester herself, and the things that happen to her -- their differing perspectives come up with different conclusions. This was a good novel to read soon after Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), which drives this point continually.
I also read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), which also did some interesting things with structure. I also really liked this, but I’ve yet to read anything by Morrison that I didn’t like. As this is her debut, I do feel that this a bit less brilliant than other novels I’ve read of hers, but it is interesting to see how she developed in her writing, especially in terms of narrative arrangement.
The Bluest Eye uses multiple perspectives and is not told chronologically, which I always enjoy. It centres on Pecola, a girl who is believed to be ugly (but isn’t really, she is just told so many times that she is that she believes it), and two sisters Claudia and Frieda who watch events in Pecola’s life unfold. It begins by focusing on these events, and then going into the personal histories of a handful of characters, bringing it back to the present.
On a sentence level, this was extremely gorgeous. My favourite parts were when the narrator reflects on beauty and what we are told is beautiful, through the (literal) lens of Pecola’s wish to have blue eyes. She has seen the adoration that small white girls have received both socially (Shirley Temple) and personally (a little girl that her mother cooks for, along with the girl’s family, who she treats with great affection), and she believes that she will be loved if her eyes change from brown to blue. Morrison dissects how these personal and social messages can impact the psychological well-being of young Black girls really well, something she says she sought to carry out in the introduction.
In something like Paradise (1997), Morrison uses the structure of the novel to her advantage, weaving her arrangement into how we perceive different elements of the story. In her debut, it did feel like she was working this out a bit -- how best to introduce characters and their backgrounds, how to write communities and migration. These things seem very effortless in her later novels, but not so much in The Bluest Eye. Still, I really enjoyed it, and am always happy to read something new (to me) by her.
I’m always interested in how narratives are arranged, because it’s so hard to do. When you start to notice how stories zip between the past and present to present a full (or intentionally not full) picture of a character or an event, it’s hard not to admire how it has been done. I love it when it becomes an intended consideration of the author and part of how the narrative is given to us, which both Calleja and Morisson are very good at.
Books on my radar
Three novels that have been published this week that I’m excited to read are Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread and Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls. This year is a really exciting one for new releases, and all three of these are top of the list.
I am also excited to read Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s A Spell of Good Things, which was released a couple of weeks ago. I loved her debut Stay With Me, so I’m excited to read this.
A reminder that Imogen’s book Deep Down was published yesterday!!! Please purchase, request from your libraries, download!!