Come Back in September - Darryl Pinckney

‘Genrely’ speaking this is a memoir but it actually reads like a Who’s Who of American literature in the 70s and 80s. And then you add New York into the mix. For me New York is like a character all of its own. I always had this theory that even if you removed every human being from Manhattan it would throb along with its own syncopated  life. But in this very erudite and intellectual memoir New York pulses with literature!  At the centre of this glitterati literati is Elizabeth Hardwick, friend and mentor to the author who has created the most detailed and palpable picture of this notable woman. So much so that I really felt I got to know her and if we were to meet I could immediately strike up a conversation based on Pinckney’s portrayal of his friend. Costarring Robert Lowell, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt - you might almost accuse Pinckney of namedropping! Except that it doesn’t come across that way at all. If anything he’s in awe all of these people as much as the reader. But he is an astute observer and creates the most tangible character sketches of all the people that he meets. But it is a memoir and as much as his friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick dominates the narrative he also gives us insights in how it was to be a gay, black man in New York during those years when AIDS was such a destroyer of life. And it’s also a book about reading and writing, the highs and the lows of both those pursuits for the professional, published writers and the scribblers. There is an engrossing insight into the New York Review of Books and how it’s run, by Elizabeth Hardwick’s friend Barbara Epstein.

The book itself had a curious structure that it took me a while to get used to. Once I did I loved it. For times it reads like the meandering thoughts that we all have only here it’s all written down and it isn’t that it’s disjointed, it is that it can flit from one, for want of a better word, anecdote to another just as one thought leads to another. Ultimately it became almost conversational albeit an extremely intellectual conversation!

It offers the reader a fascinating portrait of life in the literary world during those times. It brings life to those names that may just have been at the foot of a poem as perhaps in the case of Robert Lowell. If, like me, you have a tendency to place writers on a pedestal almost as if they were celebrities of the movie star popstar status this book shows that they were living, breathing people with the same ups and downs, arguments and traumas that we all endure. Towards the end of the book Pinckney offers his journal entries for the end of the eighties which is where the book ends. 

It’s an homage to, not just a time gone by, but a time and a place gone by. Like everything New York has changed and evolved over the decades. This book captures it as an almost literary snapshot if you will. I can’t see that it’s a book with universal appeal but for those with literary inclinations and lovers of New York City it’s an engaging read.

My thanks to Ana McLaughlin of Riverrun books for a gifted copy.

Total - Rebecca Miller

  

A collection of short stories is always a treat but even more so under the fluent pen of Rebecca Miller. This collection is diverse, yet common threads run through all the stories - intimacy, love with its many confusions as experienced by people from various walks of life, mostly women, although She Comes to Me boasts a lone, male protagonist.

I found the stories to have a very visual quality which I suppose is not surprising given Miller’s cinematic background yet they had a distinct “literary“ feel also. They are more than mere storytelling for the prose is evocative and the characterisations succinct and apt. You feel that nothing is wasted, no words no punctuation. There is as much and as little as is needed. The perfect recipe for an immersive read.

The title story is faintly dystopian in its intent perhaps yet it remains firmly entrenched in our contemporary world with perhaps an insidious warning against our device devotion. It also goes beyond that to offer reflections on  mother-daughter relationships in a powerful and striking way.

While I was reading the collection I also had the feeling of what I call the “Patricia Highsmith“ effect. That strange unsettling, unnerving sense of things just out of kilter, off balance, close but not quite normal. And in all the stories there are people you think you almost know, characters with recognisable traits and yet there is an intangible darkness that pervades them, tensions, maybe ever so slight, but they are there which I think contributes to the sense of being a little off centre. It makes the collection very compelling.

I found the collection unputdownable. Not in the sense that one has with a crime or a thriller novel but with that unspeakable pleasure one gets from reading good writing and not wanting it to stop.

My thanks to Canongate Books for a gifted copy.

The One Where I Witter on about Historical Fiction with reference to - The Flames - Sophie Haydock

 By and large I’m not a person who favours any kind of compartmentalising. But I acknowledge that many people have this need and for matters of organisation it is often a necessity. When it comes to books I am always reluctant to restrict myself to preferring this or that genre but perhaps I might make an exception when it comes to historical fiction. I do like the genre and my little ‘booktennae’ respond when the genre is mentioned or I catch sight of it somewhere. Given my eclectic taste in literature why is this genre such a pull? Perhaps it is because I am a bit of a history nerd. Except that I love physical history. I love being in places of historical significance; to be in Anne Boleyn’s bedroom at Hever Castle touching the wall or the fireplace and wondering if her hand had lingered over those very spots, to walk in Hampton Court Palace wondering if I was treading the same steps as Henry VIII, St. Georges Chapel at Windsor had me overflowing as I passed the last resting places of so many persons of note and when I stood by the coffin of Richard III in Leicester Cathedral knowing I was a few feet away from his very bones gave me what I will simply call a ‘histgasm’!
But historical fiction is not physical history so perhaps my enjoyment of the genre is a way of vicariously enjoying history from the comfort of my own unhistorical home.

Historical fiction requires a fusion of thorough research and expansive imagination. The writer of historic fiction has to be careful that the overlap between the two doesn’t tarnish the research because there’s always the risk that some nit picker is waiting, ready to pounce on the slightest inaccuracy. You just can’t mess with the facts. If you’re writing a novel abut the Titanic you can’t change the outcome and have the ship sail on into New York with the Strauss couple and the Astors intact. I suppose you could but that would be a whole new genre - ‘historical magicism’! But it’s also the motivation for writing historical fiction that fascinates me. In one sense some of the work is already done - characters, locations, events - it is the writer;s research and imagination that fuse the lot together. But what is the initial stimulus? A favourite period? An admired monarch or historical figure? An event from the past that consumes the imagination to the extent you simply can’t let go of it? It isn’t enough to read and research the facts. The facts are used to construct a fictional, yet plausible narrative around what is already known. I wonder, if for the writer, it is a way of vicariously getting closer to the subject matter? It certainly is for the reader. Or it is for this reader anyway! Or maybe there are parallels that enable a writer to figure something out in their own life? The conjectures are many. I actually think that authors of historical fiction are extraordinarily brave because it’s always going to be something of a gamble. So much depends on ‘getting it right’.

So what has suddenly prompted all this analysis and ruminating on the subject?  Well, I’ve just read Sophie Haydock’s The Flames. A debut novel, apparently. I say apparently because it didn’t read like a debut! It read like the work of an experienced novelist. And I loved it. It had been on my radar for ages when an author friend mentioned that she had bought a copy for her son’s 21st birthday and wondered if I had read it which I hadn’t at that point. Then it seemed to pop up everywhere on social media by which time my ‘bookstinct’ had firmly kicked in. My copy was a reward for my contribution to an online book community, a reward I got to choose, I hasten to add. But the book has been sitting on my TBR pile for weeks if not months. Then by some strange coincidence I noticed that the author of the book was at Ilkley Book Festival with……..the author who first put the book on my radar back in May. To me that augured well. So, finally, this month I treated myself to the reading of it and treat was the operative word!

The book is an imagining surrounding the lives of four women who were the muses of Austrian artist Egon Schiele. And in this substantial, powerful work the writer gives voice to these women who provided the subjects for some of the startling and explicit work of this incredible artist. The four women are Edith and Adele Harms, two sisters who lived opposite Schiele, his sister Gertrude and Vally, a model, friend, loyal to Egon yet fiercely independent.

Each woman is given her own section of the book and thanks to the immaculate plotting of the novel the crossover between their lives is seamless as we read each woman’s story and make the relevant links. What struck me was how the writer’s development of each character enabled the relevance of the reactions and interactions to be seen from each individual woman’s perspective. So the reader was privy to viewing the same event through different eyes. It was quite fascinating.

As well as being a work of historical fiction it’s also a book about art and artists. We learn much about Schiele himself, and his upbringing. He is a fascinating person, brought to life under Haydock’s skilful pen. I can’t say I warmed to him but his passion for his art was consummate. His paintings were challenging during his lifetime time and I imagine that for some they are no less so now. But I chuckled at Adele when her sister questioned her about whether she liked Schiele’s painting of her.

‘It’s not about whether I like it or not. It’s art.’

And perhaps the real point of the book is best summed up by a present day character, Eva,

‘I never stopped to imagine that these models had lives of their own. Living, breathing….’

I think that what makes this such a engrossing work is how vibrant the narrative is. It is no dry imagining, these women leap out of the pages, living and breathing their lives into our consciousness in such a way that we will never forget them. And of course the novel impacts on our future appreciation of Schiele’s work, how could it do otherwise? In fact I can think of no other work save perhaps Tracey Chevalier’s Girl With a Pear Earring that propels art and history to such a palpable and accessible place. And against it all the backdrop of WW1 and the Spanish flu. 

But we’ll let Edith have the last word,

’There’s only one choice Edith can make, that much is clear, to believe in love.

For without it we are nothing.’

And I think this book was written with a lot of love.

Animal Life - Audur Ava Olafsdottir - Translated by Brian Fitzgibbon - Blog Tour

I found this to be a most unusual and unique book. There were times when I felt it was less fiction than the biography of an Icelandic midwife. Domhildur is from a long line of midwives on her mother’s side and a long line of undertakers on her father’s. A paradox if ever there was one. But the whole story pivots on the yin and yang of dark and light, life and death which is motivated mostly by the letters and manuscripts of Domhildur’s late greataunt.

The narrator, Domhildur, or Dyja, as her great aunt calls her, tells us of her everyday life as a midwife living in an old fashioned apartment left to her by her aunt and when she isn’t midwifing she tells us of the expansive philosophies that she discovers within the papers of her late aunt. So if you spotted the word midwife and started having cosy thoughts about Call the Midwife you might want to think again although Raymond Nonnatus is mentioned in the narrative which somehow made me chuckle.

This is what I like to call a cerebral book. It’s not full of action and twists. It’s hard to pin down in a lot of ways which endears it to me as I enjoy genre defiant books. It’s the kind of book that has you thinking long after you’ve put it to one side - some contemporary environmental thoughts that seem ahead of great aunt’s time and some almost Zen like philosophies regarding the light and the dark of life, and the world.

The sagacity of Dyja’s aunt could even form a separate book of worthy aphorisms.

‘ Instead of being humble towards the other living creatures he shares the earth with and its plants, man wants to have everything for himself. He wants to own the fish in the sea, icebergs and freshwater rivers, he wants to own waterfalls, he wants to own islands, he would even like to own the sunset if he could. Possessions make man forget that he dies. When a person finally understand what matters, he has often started to ail and hasn’t long to go.‘

Wow, powerful words with a lot of truth in them. But if that sounds heavy, and it is potent, fear not, for the narrative is balanced with some lighter moments especially the exchanges with Dyja and her sister. It’s not a character driven narrative but there are a few other characters who play an important part. One is the electrician who offers a parallel with himself and Dyja as he is one of four electricians in his family and she is one of four midwives in her family. Unwittingly he furthers the great light/dark contemplation. 

‘You could say we work in the same sector then since you’re a mother of light, both of us work in light.’ 

He then goes on to say, ‘ In fact I’ve always been scared of the dark.‘ 

The novel is set around Christmas time which seemed to be salient, fuelling more thoughts about life. and that seems to be what the book does. There isn’t really a plot are such unless we consider Domhildur’s progression as she starts to redesign her apartment but I also saw that as her emerging from her own darkness into a new light. It’s not a long book either. it’s well written, very poetic in places and the translator, Brian Fitzgibbon, has done a brilliant job.

But perhaps I’ll let great-aunt have the last word.

‘It is said that humans never recover from being born, that the most challenging experience in life is coming into the world and at the most difficult thing is to get used to the light.‘

My thanks to Pushkin Press for a gifted copy of the book and a place upon the blog tour. Please do check out what other bloggers have to say about the book.

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir  is a prize-winning novelist, playwright and poet. Her novels have been translated into 33 languages, and have won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Prix Medicis Etranger and the Icelandic Booksellers Prize. She lives in Reykjavík.

Brian Fitzgibbon translates from Italian, French and Icelandic. Recent translations include Woman at 1000 Degrees by Halgrimur Helgason as well as Hotel Silence and Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.

The Darlings of the Asylum - Noel O'Reilly - Blog Tour

Whilst not a new subject for a work of fiction, I was reminded quite forcibly of Victoria Mas’s The Mad Woman’s Ball, Noel O’Reilly’s take on the subject is atmospheric, similarly gothic and quite immersive. I found the opening sequences riveting, as the tension was racked up and the inevitable outcome for Violet unavoidable. I could see there was a deal of research undertaken which was consistent with accounts of Victorian asylums. That women were placed in asylums, often by their families, for reasons that couldn’t be further from insanity is well documented. Here it is suggested Violet is incarcerated because of her desire to become an artist and her reluctance to marry a man she didn’t love. Deeper in the book we find that the situation may not be that ‘simple’.

Overall this book didn’t cover any new ground for me, I had a sense almost of deja vu. Nevertheless I found it an enjoyable read and I was frantically turning the pages towards the end to see what happened. I very much enjoyed the tension experienced in that sequence of the book. So I liked the beginning and I liked the end, what did I think of the middle?!?! To be honest I found it too lengthy and inconsistent in terms of Violet’s standing as a patient when compared with the other inmates and the nature of her mental state. But in another sense I thought it was trying to capture the drugged, fuzzy headed state these poor women found themselves in. I'm reluctant to say too much for fear of spoilers but the titular 'Darlings' is most chilling. And the ending was a killer twist which added to the Gothic feel of the story as a whole.

Violet was an interesting character. I liked her and I was rooting for her. Dr. Rastrick was suitably sinister and potentially more insane than any of his patients! I found myself indifferent to the majority of other characters with the exception of some of the asylum inmates who broke my heart.

I think the book captured the mood and strictures of the time, especially for women, very well and it also has much to say on attitudes towards art and artists of both genders.

My thanks to HQ stories for a gifted copy of the book and a place upon the blog tour. 

The Wheel of Doll - Jonathan Ames

If the dark,noir narrative of A Man Named Doll, tickled your Chandleresque yearnings, you’ll be delighted with this next story in the series. I’ve read the first book so I know the detail of Doll’s backstory.Some of it is dealt with in the second book, but I don’t think it impacts on the readers’ enjoyment not to have read the first. However I’m pretty sure most readers will want to!

The mood created in the first story is maintained and developed here as Happy Doll continues on his rather precarious journey as a private investigator, only here he is unlicensed after the shenanigans he created in A Man Named Doll.

Sometimes I feel Happy could be renamed Hapless as things just don’t work out the way they’re supposed to!! And I marvel at his physical endurance because here again, his poor body is subjected to much abuse, although he does appear to retain all of his major organs this time!

Happy and George continue to present as the perfect couple! 😉 Even when Happy has to leave George with a friend as this book’s action takes place outside LA for much of the time. Who is George, I hear you ask? Aha, have a read of the book to find out! 😉

A NAME FROM PAST

When Mary DeAngelo walked into Happy Doll’s office, she brings with her the scent, sandalwood perfume, a whole lot of cash, and the name of his old flame: Ines Candle. 

LURED HAPPY INTO A TRAP

Ines is living rough up in Washington State, and Mary wants her found. Happy hits the streets to track her down, but soon he realises he has been used. Now somebody is hunting them.

CAN HE FIGHT HIS WAY OUT?

Soon, two people are dead, and Happy is in big trouble. But he’s been here before, and he knows that the only way to be safe is to get even…

And that just about sums it up. With a strange paradox of seemingly every day detail yet extraordinary action and seemingly impossible situations, Jonathan Ames has created another entertaining, high octane thriller. Perhaps not for the faint hearted, or those who object to sustained recreational drug use but for those prepared to take the risk this is an exciting and darkly humorous read. A well judged narrative pace with some entertaining characters with Happy always at the centre of everything. You can’t help but like him no matter that some of his actions are questionable. And you find yourself always rooting for him to come through. I can’t wait for the next Happy Doll story,

My thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for a gifted copy of this book.