April Summary and Plans for May

I recently got hold of a copy of Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel ‘A Little Life’ (the one with the dust jacket you’d probably want to remove if reading on the bus!) so I hope to get to that soon, especially in light of your praise of her first book. And I see you plan to read ‘Shantaram’ – is that before the sequel comes out? If so, I’d had the same thought: it’s been sitting on my shelves for years but the length and the subject matter keep putting me off.

No real stand-outs for me in April, but plenty of good and very good books. I kicked off the month with EM Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’, having only read ‘A Passage to India’ by him and that many years ago. I was surprised by how funny he could be and thought it a lovely book even if the Italian and English halves did seem tonally very different and I never believed in the romance between Lucy and George.

April being the centenary of the Gallipoli landing I thought it an apt time to read Roger McDonald’s ‘1915’ (having loved his ‘The Ballad of Desmond Kale’ in March) but whilst the writing was very good, especially on life in the trenches, I found it all a little cold and distant and struggled to connect with any of the characters.

‘Black River’ by S.M. Hulse, about a former prison guard who returns to the Montana town of his birth after the death of his wife and has to face a number of personal demons, has been compared to Kent Haruf which piqued my interest. I’m not sure Hulse is quite in Haruf’s league yet, but it is a cracking debut and I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up by a UK publisher yet.

‘The Strays’ by Emily Bitto recently won Australia’s Stella Prize – it’s a lovely book about a bohemian group of artists in 1930s Melbourne (based on the Heide Circle) as seen through a teenage girl who is taken into the extended family (the strays of the title) and the effects the artists’ lifestyle has on the children who are largely left to fend for themselves. Echoes of Alex Miller’s ‘Autumn Laing’ (which was based on the same group of artists) and of AS Byatt’s ‘The Children’s Book’, but also of ‘I Capture the Castle’ and ‘The Constant Nymph’.

My final novel of the month was the late Bernardine Bishop’s “Hidden Knowledge” – its an easy, enjoyable read, but feels like a grab-bag of topical issues, where every arresting insight (and it contains a few: about loneliness, about the biological clock) seems to be balanced by a cliché, and often her characters didn’t seem to react to situations with enough feeling so it was hard as a reader to feel much for them either. Also, despite its references to emails and mobile phones, there was something curiously dated about the writing, as though it had been written in the sixties or seventies.

On the short story front I read John Barth’s ‘The Development’, a linked collection about the residents of a gated community on America’s east coast – I’d not read Barth before but he sort of puts me in mind of Ali Smith in terms of the obvious fun he has with words. I’ll definitely be reading more by him.

‘Foreign Soil’ by Maxine Beneba Clarke was on the Stella Prize shortlist along with Emily Bitto – her stories are a masterclass when it comes to voice (her stories range from old women in New Orleans to young men in Brixton, from the Caribbean to Australia) but narratively I didn’t think she was quite as strong, though a couple of stories are superb and suggest she is a writer to watch.

‘Mothers & Other Monsters’ by Maureen F. McHugh was a collection I approached with some trepidation as I haven’t had much luck with speculative fiction lately but it was really good. Nice to read a writer from that genre whose writing is “literary” and full of humanity, rather than writers from a more mainstream literary background (Michel Faber, Jane Rogers) dabbling in SF and treating it as something they don’t need to put a great deal of effort into.

My last collection of the month was Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘I Am No One You Know’ – lots of Oates’ usual tropes but with Oates it seldom becomes repetitive; they’re more like problems that she keeps worrying away at, coming at from different angles to try and get at something essential about them. Not all the stories in the collection are brilliant (she writes too many to be wholly consistent in terms of quality) but there are some belters in here: two kids who both (possibly) witness their mother’s murder but remember it very differently; a forensics expert who reconstructs faces from damaged skull fragments and becomes deeply attached to his ‘creations’; two students who protect Marilyn Monroe when she visits a used book store incognito…

Anyway, hope you have a great month of reading, Jackie, and have fun at the award ceremony.

You’ve got a great list of things to read in May. I loved Golden Boy and Euphoria. Shantaram is good, but I felt things got a little off track in the middle. That being said, I will be reading his follow up as soon as it comes out. His own personal story is so compelling.
And I’m glad you liked The People in the Trees. I really want to read it, even more than The Little Life. Seems to me like it might be a good companion to Euphoria.

How wonderful that you will get to go for the IFFP award ceremony! Cannot wait to hear about your experience at the event. I should make it a point to read People in the Trees – everyone seems to love it.