Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

 

- This new book by Jhumpa Lahiri is a collection of short stories set mostly in Rome. Her last book in 2021 was a novel, Whereabouts, also set in Rome. I reviewed it very positively here. The two have a distinct flavour. Lahiri is a chronicler of the everyday. 

- In Roman Stories she focuses on marriages, children, daily incidents, families, food, immigrants, and inevitably, racism. Gently and suggestively she infuses meaning into the mundane. There are lots of reflections on life and its vicissitudes. The perspective is often from middle aged women. They know stuff.

- An element I found frustrating at first was her refusal to locate. Nations, races, individuals, cities, suburbs, and towns are all unnamed. People are  ‘…from another continent’, a character liked ‘…music from my country’. The closest she gets to naming individuals are giving them initials like P, F, or S. This of course helps to universalise her essential focus, but I'm not sure it works. Irritating a reader is hardly wise. 

- There's quite a bit of death and racial abuse in the stories, and many of the characters have very low level, service industry jobs, again branding them as immigrants. There are also authors and academics, but interestingly, these people are usually Westerners, from Italy or 'across the Atlantic', presumably the US. 

-Some of the stories, or parts of longer stories, are powerful and beautiful. Others immerse us in ugly realism. Rebellious teenagers, for example, roam around at night and leave smashed bottles on steps, shoot pellets, assault strangers on streets and rob them. The 'steps' I think are the Spanish Steps, a place of majesty, ancient history and beauty. 

Pip Adam, The New Animals

 

- Pip Adam's The New Animals was originally published in New Zealand in 2017, and has just been released in a handsome new US edition by small publisher Dorothy, A Publishing Project. Having loved Audition, Adam's 2023 novel (which I reviewed here), I felt propelled to get into this, her earlier one. 

- Frankly, I loved it more, if that were possible. It is truly an extraordinary work. There is so much going on in it. It's an immersion in the rawness of ordinary life and its demands and tensions, but at the same time it takes a much wider, more challenging view of human society and its contemporary crises. Adam seems to be suggesting that it's over. Yes, it's that brutal. 

- Her novel explores themes of isolation and connection and despair. We are introduced to a small group of workers in the fashion industry and the contractors they hire to help them design and release a new line of clothing. There's a lot of detail about their personal interactions, frustrations and sex lives. 

- Tommy runs the company. He's ambitious but across detail and smart. A natural leader. Carla, the hairdresser, preparing models for the launch, is a generation older, as are her colleagues. There is real tension between the two generations. Tommy sees it clearly: His generation was expected to fix everything…These forty-five-year old hairdressers and pattern cutters. None of them had ever grown up. They were too busy whining and revolting. It was up to him and his friends...Carla  thought she was living the self-determined life, but she wasn’t. None of them had the money to do that. It was money.

- Adam sprinkles some fabulous observations throughout: That seemed to be the most important factual commodity these days - Anecdote, Opinion. Feeling. The American people were sick of experts.

- The final third of the novel takes us to a whole new place. It focuses on Elodie, the young makeup artist. She and Carla's vicious dog walk towards the sea late at night. The dog runs off and is never seen again (thankfully). Elodie, suicidal, sinks into calm water and seemingly transforms into a sea creature. She's surrounded by plastics and all sorts of discarded rubbish, witnessing rising sea levels, and eventually landing on an ‘island of rubbish'.

- So the ending is a real punch in the gut. We go from hope to planet doom. Adam is merciless, but she's offered us a thought-provoking novel of real depth and meaning. 

Hwang Bo-Reum, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

- This novel was a recent best-seller in Korea and has now been translated into English by Singaporean translator Shanna Tan. It's an absolutely delightful read, and full of deep insights into Korean society, work and marriage. It could be summarised as a reflection on what makes for a happy life. 

- It's also a critique of today's common workplace practices, like casuals versus permanents. 

- Yeongju resigns in frustration from her meaningless corporate career and starts a bookshop in a suburb of Seoul. She's had no experience in the book trade, but has always been an enthusiastic reader. It takes a while for her to realise what's needed to make a bookshop successful. She starts on that journey, and it's detailed and very credible. 

- First up she hires a barista and pays him well. He befriends the coffee beans supplier and they have detailed discussions about the art of making topnotch coffee (I learnt so much from that!). 

- A few other support staff are hired and regular events like book clubs and author presentations scheduled. The customer base increases. Discussions on work, happiness, career demands, personal relationships, marriage, and divorce are vigorous and enlightening. Those discussions give the book enormous power. 

- There is so much more to this book than what I've briefly described here. It's full of richness and depth that makes for a highly satisfying read.  

Iain Ryan, The Strip.

- I very much enjoyed Iain Ryan's previous novels, The Student, and The Spiral, but this one is a cut above. It's brilliant. How on earth does a crime writer who is not, and never has been, a cop, write a novel as intricate and informed as this? It's so real, and the characters so believable. There are none of your tired and empty cliches. 

- The setting is the Gold Coast in the early 80’s - the criminal underclass, the corrupt police, and the deadening conservative culture and society more generally. We're a decade or two prior to the reforms introduced by the Wayne Goss and Peter Beattie governments. As the key criminal player says at one point: One day, everything I do here on the coast will be legal. The fucking, the gambling, abortions, drugs. The lot.

- A serial killer is on the loose. Detective Constable Lana Cohen from Sydney has been sent up north to work with a bunch of detectives investigating the deaths of eight victims of a serial killer. But the police on the Gold Coast are incompetent, lazy and stupidly blokey. Beer and prostitutes is all they care about. The place is known as a ‘punishment posting’. It is where the Force sends its weakest officers. ‘They’re dogs, each and all’.

- Ryan thickens the story with a lot of characters and twists, so the reader is challenged to stay with it. But that pays off in spades. He builds an extremely satisfying resolution with some stunning reveals.

- This is a masterful piece of work. It is easily one of the best crime novels I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. 

- Here are some reviews from authors who know what they're talking about: 

Steeped in the bitter lore of old-school policing and backlit by the gaudy neon of the Gold Coast streets, The Strip is hands done one the the finest Australian crime novels you'll ever read. (David Whish-Wilson)

Tense and compelling. (Garry Disher)

Iain Ryan's The Strip is an eye popping, nightmarish miasma that sets a new bar for Australian crime. Drenched in sweat, despair and corruption, think David Fincher's Seven, set on the Gold Coast in the 1980's. Except weirder and with more tension. A total triumph in every respect. (Chris Flynn)

The Strip is bingeworthy reading - a gritty crime thriller reeking of corruption, murder and sex. If you like your heroines flawed and kick-ass and your cops dirty as hell, you'll love Iain Ryan's gripping foray into the underworld of the Gold Coast. Hardly took a breath from first page to last. (Kate Mildenhall)

If David Peace wrote a novel set in Queensland's Gold Coast in the 1980's, the result would be The Strip. Fast paced, gritty, sharply observed noir that goes hard into the sleaze and corruption of the moonlight state. (Andrew Nette)

Paul Dalgarno, A Country of Eternal Light.

 

- A brilliant and exhilarating novel that creates magic out of the mundane. One of the best novels I’ve read this year, and easily the best Australian one. 

- Dalgarno submerges us deep into the ordinary lives of a working class family in Scotland. There's nothing that distinguishes them other than their deep love for one another despite occasional tensions. Margaret and Henry live in a council flat and have two twin daughters Rachel and Eva. 

- We span the decades from after World War II to 2021, and although the 'Living Margaret' dies in 2014, the 'Dead Margaret' revisits key events over that period and reflects on them. It doesn't take long as a reader to get used to that authorial device, in fact to love it, as her voice has a gentle touch, and she's a charming and sensitive woman. Like Dante, she reflects, ‘I’m on a divine mission’. (She ain't that divine however - in 2021, during Covid, she doesn’t know why people are wearing masks or social distancing!).

- We're told the daughters grow up and have relationships and children of their own. Rachel moves to Australia and Eva to Spain. I use the words 'we're told' deliberately. Dalgarno provides a shocking reveal at the end that throws a whole new light on everything that comes before. I reread chapter after chapter and was, once again, utterly transfixed by his genius. 

- Read this and revel in the delicious prose and storytelling. 

Tony Birch, Women and Children

- I was not a great fan of Tony Birch's previous novel The White Girl but this one is simply superb. It's an absorbing and fascinating story with multiple layers of richness.  

- Joe Cluny is an eleven year old boy who attends a local Catholic school in a working class suburb of Melbourne in the mid-sixties. He's not too bright and is always getting into trouble. His thirteen year old sister Ruby on the other hand is dux of her class and well liked. Sister Mary Josephine and Father Edmond run the school and force all the kids to swallow the very traditional and silly Catholic beliefs and practices. It's profound ignorance dressed up as piety. It's also dangerous and abusive. The cane is always at hand. 

- Marion is Joe and Ruby's mother, and Charlie is their grandfather. Charlie's shed is full of stuff that fascinates Joe, and his friend Ranji is a scrap metal dealer. They are mature and kindly men that epitomise what real men should be. They also tell stories and read books, which Joe and Ruby find inspiring. 

- Oona is Marion’s younger sister. Oona is in a relationship with Ray, a local electric goods shopowner. He is a vicious abuser, as are so many of the shysters that are dotted throughout the community. But she keeps returning to him, believing her abuse won't happen again, and perhaps she was to blame anyway. 

- The local priest has an opinion: ‘If she was a married woman, this would not have happened’.

- Of course the beatings continue, and get more vicious. 

- The way Birch brings all the threads together at the end is immensely satisfying. There were a number of ways things could have gone, but he keeps the story grounded. 

- Well worth a read. 

Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

- This novel was shortlisted for this year's Booker, and was predicted to win by a number of critics. 

- It didn't win but it certainly deserved its place on the shortlist. It's absolutely brilliant. (Paul Lynch's Prophet Song actually won).

- Early in the novel our unnamed narrator lands at an airport in an unnamed country, walks towards the automatic exit doors, but 'the sensors did not at first register my movement, however exaggerated, so I had to wait until another recently deplaned passenger passed though the doors...' This says everything about the novel's essential meaning. She is a young woman (negative number one) and, as is slowly and subtly revealed, Jewish (negative number two).  

-She goes to her older brother’s mansion in the north of this unnamed country to be his 'retainer' (really a domestic slave). There's a ‘surface placidity...a kind of idiot impenetrability’ to him. He’s a very successful businessman, recently divorced, insufferable and self-entitled, and politically on the right. She's not bothered. She loves him, as she does all her siblings. 

- Previously she had been a journalist and an audio typist for a legal firm. She doesn't speak the language of this 'northern country' and the inhabitants of the town she now lives in don't speak English (or don't bother too).

- The fact that the country is not named is frustrating at first. But as the novel progresses that lack of specificity amplifies the universality of the treatment she receives - the abject prejudice.

- Interestingly, and because of the antisemitism she experienced at school, she doesn't like identifying as Jewish. She ‘gave the impression of being clean and without history, like gentiles, like people unstained by ancestral shame...I steadfastly refused to say the bracha over our classroom Sabbath ceremonies’. 

- Bernstein broadens her focus to the subtle savagery of majorities in regard to minorities, whether Jews, Indigenous, or ‘foreigners’. They’re forced to shrink and hide. She depicts victimhood so well. In the local cafe for example the racist vibe is ugly. 

- Strange things happen in the town to various animals, all pretty normal, but the residents feel her presence among them is the cause. 

- Bernstein provides an interesting twist at the end which is very satisfying and apt. There is no horror or victory or evil but there is peace.  'I know they will not come because they do not need too'. 

- I read this novel twice, luxuriating in the delicious prose and subtlety. It's so good.