Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

 

- Love is central in this 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize for fiction. And the power of infidelity. Jenny Erpenbeck is a celebrated German author whose previous novels have won or been shortlisted for multiple awards. 

- In Kairos (the ancient god of fortunate moments) young nineteen year old Katharina meets fifty-three year old Hans on a bus in East Berlin and they become lovers. The time period is the late 1980's just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the re-integration of East and West Germany. Hans adores her beauty and intelligence, but he is married. They have to keep it secret. He’s a writer and broadcaster, she a trainee printer and typesetter. They love music and they like cafes and restaurants and films. Their relationship is intense but it's also on-again off-again over the next few years. 

- In the background is the social upheaval surrounding them. Hans in particular does not relish the West. He's always appreciated the Russian state and its communist legacy. ‘…the Russians out of a backwards country created an industrial state in the space of two decades: Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. 

- At one point Katharina visits Cologne in the West to see her aunt, her family, and her grandmother for her birthday. She sees beggars on the streets. Manfred, her uncle, trots out the usual ‘lazy, is what they are’ rhetoric. But clothing, food and utilities are a lot cheaper. She even visits a sex shop, something non-existent in the East. Erpenbeck describes what the shop has on offer in one of most extraordinary paragraphs in a literary novel you're ever likely to read. Here it is in full:

She sees all at once all there is for a human to see. She sees penises, stiff cocks with bulgy veins, rosy, pallid, brown, and black, with glistening heads, sees them thrust fat and stiff into slits, into mouths, shoved between breasts, gripped in hands, see female vulvas, their wavy flesh, sees them open, hairy or clean shaven, wet, sullied, dripping, gleaming, stretching, sees pendulous breasts, tits with great dark areoles, and others, pointy pink raspberries, sees gaping mouths, gaping assholes, plump labia, wrinkled ball sacks, everything pushed together, rubbed together, forced apart, thrusting, gagging, sucking, drooling, strings of saliva, here, on the ground of freedom, tits and cocks and cunts, she sees asses and erections, sees massive hard-ons, slutty tongues, sees liquids burst from knobs, ejaculated over buttocks and breasts, into mouths, onto eyelids and tongues, sees slime, spunk, spit, and piss, sees shit...

- Her frequent sex with Hans is usually loving and sensitive but often descends into pain and abuse. He ties her to her bed and strikes her with his belt. ‘A long time ago it was a game. Now it’s deadly earnest.’ 

- His wife, Ingrid, discovers the affair and throws Hans out. But is the marriage really over? He writes: ‘the relationship exists on a plane that (however painful) leaves the foundations of the marriage untouched’. As usual he gets it both ways. He and Ingrid get back together and Katharina gets a job at a Frankfurt theatre, where she has an affair with Vadim.

- Hans won't forgive her for that. He owns her after all. He belittles her, insults her, blames her entirely. They soon drift apart. He loses his job as do so many in the old East Germany. 

- Erpenbeck has written a deep and penetrating (sorry) exploration into relationships, passions, and personal pain. Embedded in political and social structures that govern so much that we may be unaware of. 

Colm Toibin, Long Island

- In his usual masterful way Colm Toibin’s prose is clear, precise, simple and gentle. It's never overdone or elaborate and is a joy to read. In all his novels he shows such empathy for ordinary people and the rhythms of their lives. We're thrust into the very domestic dramas of people and their families living in small communities and towns.  

- In Long Island Toibin takes us back to his powerful 2009 novel Brooklyn and his main protagonist Eilis, a young Irish woman who fled Ireland for New York, deserting her lover Jim. That final, life-changing decision - praised by most reviewers for its rectitude and honor, but utterly wrong in my view for its cowardice and immaturity - was gut-wrenching.

- Twenty years later she is still married to Tony, an Italian, and they have with two teenage children. Unfortunately, Tony has got an unknown woman pregnant. Under no circumstances will Eilis allow the baby to live in her house despite pressure from the woman's husband. 

- At this point Toibin takes us back to Ireland where we meet the widow Nancy, a fish and chip shop owner. We're also re-introduced to Jim, now a bar owner and Nancy's fiancé. Nancy’s best friend was Eilis, and now Eilis has returned to Ireland to celebrate her mother's 80th birthday. So there you have it. The stage is set for competing dramas and tensions. 

- Typical of village life, all the characters are close and nosey. Perhaps it's suffocating at times, a bit cloying and sentimental, but always delightful. However Toibin has the ability to rise to higher levels and confront us with life-changing decisions and moral choices, without becoming heavy handed or preachy. Reality and romance are in conflict and the sacred marriage bond honoured or not. Truth, fidelity and commitment are hard. And what really is love?

- Like Brooklyn, that really got inside the mind and social context of a young person, Long Island is a narrative of incredible power and resonance, and one that won't let you go for days and nights after you've finished it. 

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

- This book is unbelievably good. It’s a must read if you want a detailed background to the current Israel/Gaza war.

- Since its publication in 2020 it's been universally lauded by noted scholars and the supporters of Palestine and its struggles over the last 100 years. It's full of detail yet its lucid prose makes it very readable. 

- Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. 

- Here is a recent piece Khalidi wrote for The Guardian on the current Israel/Hamas war.

Jonathan Buckley, Tell

 

- British author Jonathan Buckley's latest novel Tell, published recently in Australia by Giramondo, is an entrancing tale of personality, family and friends. It was a joint winner of the 2022 The Novel Prize, a global biennial award for literary fiction written in English. 

- What makes the novel such a pleasure to read is the voice of the narrator. An unnamed woman, who has long worked as a gardener on a wealthy man's estate, is telling an unnamed listener the story of the man and his family and close friends. 

- Apart from their wealth, the family is fairly ordinary. The man is a very successful clothing entrepreneur and art collector who adored his wife, now deceased. They had three children and daughters-in-law, some talented some not, some good some not so good. 

 

- The unnamed woman is a wonderful story teller. She's definitely a ‘talker’, thoroughly enjoying this opportunity to give her views. They're detailed, insightful and earthy. She’s almost omniscient. She refers constantly to Harry, the maintenance man on the estate, who is a mate and obviously also an acute observer. Ordinary folk are telling the tale. 'You know what I mean?'.

- The head of the clan, Curtis, had various female friends after his wife's death, some intimate, some not. Lara, a journalist and author, was very close. She was working on a biography of him. He was an abandoned baby who grew up in foster care passed on from various couples.  

- Gradually, as we learn more about all the characters involved in this tale, we become aware of the various ways personalities are created. There's truth and falsity, self-awareness and pretence, comfort and anxiety, pain and drugs. 

- Curtis tells a story at the end of the narration that sticks. A young Jewish nurse, Lea, and a German law student, Adrian, fell in love but were separated before the war. Accidentally they found each other 50 years later. 

- Our narrator insists: ‘No one could take the place of Lily’. 

- I absolutely loved this brilliant novel and its brilliant narrator. That voice! 

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club

 

- First published in 2020 this delightful, very English murder mystery accompanied me on a short visit to Noosa this week. The characters from the Coopers Chase Retirement Village in the town of Fairhaven, were marvellous companions. The book has been a huge bestseller world wide.

- A rich tapestry is slowly constructed with heaps of detail but all the threads are satisfactorily resolved in the end. It's full of stories of redemption, forgiveness, joy and hope. And Osman’s wit enlivens the tale immeasurably. 

- The Murder Club's four seniors in their mid-seventies are full of vitality and intelligence. They don’t miss a beat, despite the standard physical ailments relating to old age. There are a couple of murders in the village and the police, Chris and Donna, of course get involved. Their relationship with the seniors is a central focus of the book. And as characters, they're lovely. 

 - Of course there are red herrings everywhere. The story gets pretty convoluted towards the end, and minor characters whom we barely remember surprisingly emerge as major ones. Yet justice has been done.

- Osman has written three more novels in this vein - The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed, and The Last Devil to Die. I'm certain they'll be as delightful as his first. 

Three short novels I read while holidaying in Tokyo

Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect  X

- This bestselling novel written in 2004 starts off as a fascinating crime thriller set in Tokyo. 

- A hard working woman is visited by her ex-husband who has tracked her down and wants to re-unite with her. She and her teenage daughter, however, want nothing to do with him and during an argument end up killing him in their apartment. Their neighbour hears the commotion and offers to help dispose of the body and clean up any evidence of their crime. 

- As the drama develops however it thickens with so much microscopic detail it totally bogs the story down and becomes tedious.

- The resolution, blurbed as a surprise ending, is also quite absurd.

- Why this was a bestseller is beyond me. Forget it.  

                                         Seishi Yokomizo, The Honjin Murders

- This detective story was written in 1948 and set in 1937. Yokomizo, who died in 1981, was a prolific and very popular crime writer in Japan.

- The novel is a fascinating and enjoyable read. It’s a ‘locked room’ mystery, a genre that is frequently used by seasoned crime writers.

- The narrator is a character in the novel. He confides in us as he outlines what he’s doing. He’s charming and likeable. The Japanese setting is also captivating.

- The resolution is surprising, and how the perpetrator pulled the whole complex thing off a little hard to believe. Nevertheless he did it!

- Definitely worth reading.

                                              Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station

- This is a brilliant, big picture perspective on Japan and particularly Tokyo.

- It focuses on one man's sad life, a life encompassed by tragedy and poverty. Now dead, the man reflects on all the major events that affected him, his family, his friends, and his country - the Second World War and the huge number of lives lost, the horrendous Kanto earthquake of 1923 which killed hundreds of thousands and injured many more, the sudden deaths of his young son and wife, how he ended up homeless and sleeping on the streets, and his frequent urge to commit suicide. 

- It's a short 180 page novel that I will definitely re-read. Beautifully written and full of wisdom.