What I've been reading this week

16/05/25

Good evening!

I can’t actually remember why there wasn’t a newsletter last week, but I do remember that there was a valid reason. I think it might have just been ‘feeling very very tired’ after travelling to Cambridge and back to speak at a Common Threads Press event about my research (very fun, very good), and then diving straight back into work.

If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂

My twitter/X is @jessf_white, my Instagram is @lunchpoems, my Bluesky is @jesswhite

What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it

I have three novels to report back on, two just okay, one brilliant. The first one was an advanced copy of Half Light by Mahesh Rao, gifted to me by Pushkin, out in September. This had such an interesting premise, with its narrative told from the perspective of two young gay men In India before and after the legalisation of homosexuality in 2018. They each take turns telling their shared and separate stories, starting in Darjeeling and ending in Mumbai. Pavan is a worker at a hotel that Neville is staying in with his mother and her close friend, and both of them hide their sexuality from those around them. Pavan has moved away from his family on the other side of the country after a lifetime of isolation and a lack of love, suppressing his sexual and romantic urges in order to appear straight. Neville is much more daring - although he hides his queerness from his religious mother, he uses dating apps and real-life encounters to live out a healthy sex life, treading a daring line. In Darjeeling they share a brief affair when a rainstorm causes the main road out of the area to close, and they and a small group of people are stuck. A few years later, they are both living in Mumbai at the time of the law against homosexuality being repealed, and we gain insight into how this affects them in their very different social positions.

I really wanted to love this book but my overall feeling is that it was quite dull. I’m not entirely sure what it was - the writing at a line level was good, the story was intriguing and the characters well-constructed. I think it was slightly overlong -- its central points were driven very thoroughly, making it a bit of a drag. When I was thinking about whether I liked it or not, my main feeling was that ‘it was dull but I learned a lot’. Unfortunately this can’t really hold up as a defence because I don’t fiction to only learn things. A shame.

The next novel I read was another gifted novel, The Silence Between by Josie Ferguson, which is out with Penguin in paperback now. Another one I wanted to love because of its premise, which focuses on German women in Berlin during WWII and during the Soviet annexation of East Berlin. Two things I’m interested in - the USSR and how people act during times of tumult and war. The story, like Half Light, focuses on two characters, this time a mother and a daughter. The mother, Lisette, lives with her own mother during the election of Hitler to power and the outbreak of war. She pines after her childhood friend, who is conscripted to fight on the front line, and misses her father who is conscripted for a second time. Her daughter Elly is born after the Soviets move in, who inherits Lisette’s knack for musical ability but remains unloved by her mother because of a range of trauma that unfolds throughout the novel. The novel actually starts when the wall is secured between East and West, with Elly’s younger brother stuck in a hospital in the West with no allowances made for them to visit or retrieve him to their side of the city. We go from there, unpacking a story that covers these two huge historic events and how they impact the everyday person.

I think Ferguson shows quite well how people lived under Nazi rule and who and who did not agree with Hitler, as well as what some people thought of the Soviets. Ultimately, however, I don’t think I’m the intended audience for this because the narrative and character developments were *so* neat and evenly tied up, and it hit on big war-era issues with a kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge transparency. I prefer a bit of opaqueness and a more abstract narrative style that hones in on a handful of themes, rather than hitting quite a large amount with obviousness.

The next novel I read is the one I loved, which I was very much ready for. My library book this month was Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), and right from the off I knew this was one for me. It has that kind of humorous but detailed writing style from the mid-century that I love (long sentences with interesting word choices that feel like they’re written with a bit of a laugh and a flourish). I think if you have seen the film or just know about it in the cultural sphere you’ll be aware of the story, but anyway, it’s about a young woman living in New York with her slightly older struggling actor husband Guy, who finally makes it to the top of the waiting list for a building that they are desperate to live in, an old nineteenth-century block that has an interesting and varied history. They move into an apartment that is bigger than they could have imagined and are quickly introduced to their elderly neighbours who seem nice but are a little bit too interested in Rosemary and Guy’s lives. While living there, Guy gets his big break in acting and they start a family, much to both of their delight.

I can’t say that this was a particularly scary book, but I think for people living through Satanic panics in the 60s/70s, this would have been anxiety-inducing at the very least. Removed from the fear element, I do think that this is an excellently-paced story that brings in social elements into a horror story with subtle precision -- Rosemary is a lapsed Catholic, for example, and this fits in really well with her reception of a growing anti-religious sentiment in the circles she mixes in, highlighted by a visit from the Pope to New York City. What I think is done extremely well is how manipulation and coercion can and does occur, especially to young women, which results in them believing that they are the ones who are unreasonable when they suspect that they are being taken advantage of. This was especially highlighted in a scene when Rosemary’s girlfriends are outlining to her that something odd is going on, and it cements a sense that women in community help one another in these kinds of situations. It’s quite something that a male author gets right to the heart of that, especially in an era when misogyny and gender-based oppression was so prominent.

More next week!