Category: Books Read 2020

#14 (2020) Orchid and The Wasp by Caoilinn Hughes

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My pre-lock down mosey around Chapters led to my buying Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy (thoughts here), and Caoilinn Hughes’s Orchid and the Wasp. I’d seen Hughes’s book while it was still in hardback and enjoyed the first few pages when I’d leafed through it in the shop. The end result, however, was not so satisfactory.

In this dazzlingly original debut novel, award-winning Irish writer Caoilinn Hughes introduces a heroine of mythic proportions in the form of one Gael Foess. A tough, thoughtful, and savvy opportunist, Gael is determined to live life on her own terms. Raised in Dublin by single-minded, careerist parents, Gael learns early how a person’s ambitions and ideals can be compromised— and she refuses to let her vulnerable, unwell younger brother, Guthrie, suffer such sacrifices.

When Gael’s financier father walks out on them during the economic crash of 2008, her family fractures. Her mother, a once-formidable orchestral conductor, becomes a shadow. And a fateful incident prevents Guthrie from finishing high school. Determined not to let her loved-ones fall victim to circumstance, Gael leaves Dublin for the coke-dusted social clubs of London and Manhattan’s gallery scene, always working an angle, but beginning to become a stranger to those who love her. 

The first few chapters set the scene and give a little family history, which helps to contextualise the characters in the book, and you very quickly get a sense of Gael’s personality. Child-Gael seems independent, bossy, and wilful, and not much changes! ‘Raised’ by two fairly unsentimental parents, her actions seem to be reflective of both the environment in which she was brought up, and her father’s financial preoccupations.

Hughes’s writing style is engaging and witty, and I particularly enjoyed the parts where Gael’s mother, Sive, is in the mix. Hughes’s musical descriptions are rich and suggest a sound knowledge of the works referenced and Sive’s career as a conductor. The musicologist in me revelled a little in the descriptive passages, which are beautiful and emotive in a way that we aren’t encouraged to be. One exchange between Gael and Sive stuck out in particular:

Leaning in, her hands on either side of the turntable, Sive heard out the conversation between a flute and E-flat clarinet until cellos introduced their gentle, chordal strokes and a pair of harps stippled like rain. Then, she lifted the needle back an inch to the beginning of the discourse. ‘What do you hear?’ Sive didn’t raise her head to ask this. ‘Love… or lament?’ (Pg. 31) (The piece in question is Lutosławski’s Fourth Symphony)

The question Sive poses reminded me of a lecture I had in third year, in which we were played a piece of music and then asked to say which emotion we felt it reflected. I said love, which triggered a whole other conversation about whether love was an emotion or a state of being. Anyway, I digress. Hughes’s description here is lovely and evocative; I can see Sive’s actions, the concentration in her face. Hughes goes on to detail Sive’s appearance through the eyes of Gael, who disapproves of her knee-length waistcoat (that Gael wouldn’t wear for a bet, but looked borderline cool, she had to admit).

The narrative takes Gael to university in London and then across to New York, where her entrepreneurial exploits take shape. My main difficulty with this aspect of the book was a) plausibility of the story and b) how much I disliked Gael. I just didn’t find her a likeable character. She reminded me of those girls at school who just thought they were the embodiment of what was right – everyone else could go jump.

That said, Hughes writing was excellent and the poet in her came through. I’d say it’s worth a look, particularly if you’re unperturbed by a less-than-likeable protagonist! Thoughts welcome, as always.

#13 (2020) The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride

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There aren’t many books I re-read year after year, but The Lesser Bohemians is one of them. Last year I bought this paperback copy specifically so that I could take it on my trip to California. Now I associate it with pre-dawn jet-lagged mornings, drinking tea in the cosy reading corner in my friend’s lovely home, and the sound of heavy rain (California was uncharacteristically wet the week I went!) It’s weird how objects can transport us back to places.

McBride’s first novel, A Girl is a Half Formed Thing is beautifully crafted and well worth buying. Her latest novel, Strange Hotel was published this February and you can read my thoughts on it here.

The vibrant energy of 1990s London. A year of passion and discovery. The anxiety and intensity of new love. 

An eighteen-year-old Irish girl arrives in London to study drama and falls violently in love with an older actor. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both. At once epic and exquisitely intimate, The Lesser Bohemians is a celebration of the dark and the light in love.

As the burb suggests, love is at the core of The Lesser Bohemians, and the relationship between the two protagonists is the primary focal point. However, the novel is also concerned with growth and maturity; facing one’s demons head on; and the importance of trust. Truth and trust play a big role in shaping the actions of the characters, and the consequences are often grim and gritty.

Like McBride’s first novel, The Lesser Bohemians deals with some very difficult — and often explicit — content. There are passages where the desire to cringe is strong, and often I find myself wanting to just get inside the book and rescue the characters from themselves. They’re both scarred and damaged and in need of love. At times, their self-destructive tendencies are hard to bear. However, it is a testament to McBride’s writing and storytelling that the book remains hopeful. It sucks you in and pulls at your emotions until you are ‘just one more page’-ing until you manage to stop (not aided by the lack of chapters).

McBride’s writing is often quite fragmentary. She skips from short, sharp sentences to longer passages, but rarely conforms to what you might consider ‘traditional’ prose. This, I think, is one of the most pleasurable and evocative aspects of her novels. Take this passage, for example:

Coffee smelt cinema no kissing here.* Long limbs crooked to fit. Balled coats kicked under. Darkening. Music there. Quiet here. Then it comes, in its light and white-light. From the start, it has me. I am unprepared. Paralyse in its image. Forward to breathe as birds fleer from the Virgin’s dress. The stamp of it. Weight in me. All down my neck. (Pg. 55)

*In the book there are parts of the text printed in a smaller font, indicating the thought-process of the narrator. This isn’t possible to replicate on WordPress, hence the non-italic text.

Or this, from later in the book:

And where the eye goes, an ocean. No. Overcast sea. In with the hiss of it. In with eyes wetting breeze like sea does, hair goes, strands across tongue. Far off, in pewterish clouds and rain. The rolling unseen where whales might be and underneath does not even bear thinking of. Does not bear there but bears me up. On a skillet pallet small boat. Where I am stood strid and balanced, but for the swell. Over small rollers. Over the place like unreasonable same. Hidden from a shore. Tir na. (Pg. 111)

This latter passage is flavoured with McBride’s Irishness. Tir na, at the end of the extract, is likely a reference to Tír na nÓg (land of the young) from Irish mythology. There are small hat tips to Ireland throughout the book, although less so than in A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, which was scattered with lots of scrumptious Hiberno-English.

In short, McBride’s book is brilliant. She is an exceptional wordsmith and her handling language makes me all of abuzz. The Lesser Bohemians is one those unassuming and often forgotten books that I’m always encouraging people to read. As always, thoughts and feedback are welcome!

#12 (2020) The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

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Next up on my March 2020 reads was The Fellowship of the Ring (FotR), the first novel in Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings Trilogy (LotR). It has been years since I read these books and I vividly recall finding them quite a tough read as a teenager (the second half of The Two Towers (TTT), in particular, seemed interminable.) However, returning to it as an adult was a completely different experience and I enjoyed every minute. I was annoyed at myself for only bringing the first book to Dublin, particularly when the country went into lockdown and I was no longer able to nip to Chapters and pick up the other two. Fortunately, books two and three are now enroute.

Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power – the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring – the ring that rules them all – which has fallen into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins.

In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.

I was ten when the first of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films came out at the cinema. While I don’t have particularly strong memories of seeing them on the big screen, I do remember the years of LotR obsession that followed! I was mad for Middle Earth, watched the films on repeat, learnt the Elvish passages by heart, and bought myself an Evenstar. I was also a member of an online forum where I ‘hung out’ with other fans, spent a lot of time engaged with role plays (essentially collaborative storytelling, for those who haven’t partaken in this particular pastime), and learnt to make digital LotR-themed fan art. I was (am!) quite the geek and, on reflection, a lot of my researcher tendencies can probably be traced back to this point. All of this to say, my love of LotR (similar to that of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series) goes deep.

The intricacies of the world that Tolkien created is something I struggle to get my head around (in a good way). I just can’t quite believe that someone could have the imagination, determination, and patience to create a whole new world and its history. If you’ve never really taken the lid off the LotR box and had a peek, I’d urge you to do so. Spend half an hour looking at all of the books, appendices, maps and so on, and just marvel at the sheer depth of the detail. At a book-level, this detail can make the novels a little dense. But, I found that when I read FotR this time around, a lot of the beauty was in the detail. Here, for example:

To the South, over the line of the Withywindle, there was a distant glint like pale glass where the Brandywine River made a great loop in the lowlands and flowed away out of the knowledge of the hobbits. Northward beyond the dwindling downs the land ran away in flats and swellings of grey and green and pale-earth colours, until it faded into a featureless and shadowy distance. Eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess of blue sky, but it spoke to them, out of memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains. (Pg. 179)

Isn’t that just delicious? Sure, Tolkien could have used far fewer words to describe the hobbits looking out over the landscape. But in describing it this way he gives both a sense of geography and landscape. I feel like I’m there with Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, taking in those shifting sights. I particularly love the Eastward description; vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess of blue sky. It makes me think of times I’ve stood on a mountainside and taken in the landscape, looking out to the farthest reaches of the horizon where everything becomes a little smudged.

The pleasure of not reading the books before watching the films (opposite to my Harry Potter experience – don’t recommend that) was that I wasn’t spotting errors in narrative or dialogue. There are some passages in the book that are taken and transplanted to different parts of the films, or given to different characters. These things annoyed me less than they would have if I’d already fixed these things in my mind via the books. This particularly famous quote from the films, for example, takes place early in the FotR:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” (Pg. 67)

The syntax is different from the films as I imagine Jackson wanted to make it less archaic. Indeed, the dialogue in the novel as a whole has an older feel to that of the films, but I think both work in their different media. Similarly, small details like the role of Arwen in the FotR film – which is substantially greater than in the book – works to modernise the tale somewhat and allows a bit of female empowerment, which is severely lacking in the trilogy as a whole. Women in general, in fact, seem not to have been on Tolkien’s radar at all, but that particular can of worms could easily take up a whole other blog post!

If, like me, you tried the LotR books in your youth and found them a bit treacly, I’d urge you to go back and have another go. And if you’ve yet to enter Middle Earth, you’re in for a treat (but read The Hobbit first!)

Namárië.

#11 (2020) Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

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Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy was a lovely little slip of a book. A brief 161 pages of characteristically lovely writing and clever storytelling. Smith’s novels are always full of the unexpected and are all the richer for it.

Girl meets boy. It’s a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? 

Ali Smith’s remix of Ovid’s most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can’t be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world.

Smith’s tale deals with a heady mix of topics, including sexuality, gender, discrimination, and body image. The protagonist, Athena, is a bit of a misfit. A little lost in life, she’s puttering along trying to her best to make her way and to fit in at work. She lives with her sister, Imogen, who seems to have a firmer grasp on things. The narrative is mostly told from Athena’s perspective, but Imogen gets her own section in the book, too.

It would be easy to give everything away with such a short book, so I’ll keep this brief. Needless to say, Smith’s writing is artful, funny, and full of flare. I always really enjoy her novels, and this one was no exception. I marked this passage for its particularly striking and Smithian feel:

The grey area, I’d discovered, had been misnamed: really the grey area was a whole other spectrum of colours new to the eye. She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl… (Pg. 83-4)

There are rich and wonderful passages, like the one above, and then there are these lovely throwaway but hugely meaningful lines:

It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.

If you’re a Smith fan, this book won’t disappoint, and if you’re new to her writing then this would make for a lovely introduction.

#10 (2020) A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum

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I was lured towards A Woman is No Man in Hodges Figgis at the start of the year thanks to its bright cover and striking title. The feminist in me got all prickly and I was interested to see what it was all about.

Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children – four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.

Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.

But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family…

As the blurb suggests, the narrative is split between Isra and her daughter Deya, with occasional chapters from Fareeda. Rum’s novel deals with the realities of arranged marriage, from the lining up of potential suitors to the union that follows. The three generation perspective allows for a range of viewpoints to come through; Fareeda’s thoughts about a woman’s role are far more conventional to those of Deya, for example, who was born and raised in Brooklyn. However, all three women are linked by an overarching sense of duty and expectation reinforced by their culture. Isra and Deya in particular find small ways to push against these expectations, and each feel constricted by their seemingly predestined path.

She wished she could open her mouth and tell her parents, No! This isn’t the life I want. But Isra had learned from a very young age that obedience was the single path to love. So she only defied in secret, mostly with her books. Every evening after returning from school, after she’d soaked a pot of rice and hung her brothers’ clothes and set the sufra and washed the dishes following dinner, Isra would retreat quietly to her room and read under the open window… (Pg. 6-7)

The novel wasn’t the easiest read. The subject matter is tough going and there’s an overarching sense of powerlessness that pervades the book and that made me feel angry for the protagonists. I found the way the women were treated difficult to deal with and I was crying out for an all-out rebellion. The similarities between the characters’ lives made me worry that history was going to repeat itself, ad infinitum. However, it also provided me with greater insight into the culture, which I previously knew relatively little about.

I think this is an important read to raise awareness, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with the subject matter, but perhaps not one that you should start if your mood is a little low, or there’s a coronavirus pandemic tearing through the world.

#9 (2020) Saltwater by Jessica Andrews

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Sometimes, you pick a book up and want to buy it immediately. Sometimes, you can’t give into that urge, but the book waits in the wings, on wishlists or mental inventories. This was very much the case with Saltwater, which I remember looking at when it was published last spring. I ordered it in from the library last month and will be sad to send it back!

When Lucy wins a place at university, she thinks London will unlock her future. It is a city alive with pop up bars, cool girls and neon lights illuminating the Thames at night. At least this is what Lucy expects, having grown up seemingly a world away in working-class Sunderland, amid legendary family stories of Irish immigrants and boarding houses, now-defunct ice rinks and an engagement ring at a fish market. 

Yet Lucy’s transition to a new life is more overwhelming than she ever expected. As she works long shifts to make ends meet and navigates chaotic parties from East London warehouses to South Kensington mansions, she still feels like an outsider among her fellow students. When things come to a head at her graduation, Lucy takes off for Ireland, seeking solace in her late grandfather’s cottage and the wild landscape that surrounds it, wondering if she can piece together who she really is. 

One of things I found most enjoyable about Andrews’s novel was its form or structure. The narrative is told in a series of fragments, ranging from a couple of sentences to a page or two. These shift around temporally, moving from the present to the past, detailing Lucy’s life and that of her extended family. These help to flesh out present-day Lucy and to explain how she came to be squirrelled away in her grandfather’s isolated cottage in Donegal.

As someone who loves nature and being outdoors, I found Andrews’s descriptions of the Donegal landscape particularly enticing and rich in their detail. I wanted to get onto Airbnb and find myself a little cosy cottage in which to hide out with stacks of books and mugs of tea. These descriptions contrasted sharply with those of Lucy’s life in London, which is depicted as being fairly wild and gritty. I found the London scenes convincing but harder to relate to than her beach walks! This, for example, resonates much more than a description of a rave in some seedy London bar…

Now that I am in Ireland, I am screaming on vast beaches when there is no one else around. I am swimming in the sea, spreading my body wide in the water, feeling my limbs and lungs stretching as far as they can. I am lying in the grass in the cottage garden and watching the stars at night, letting my thoughts wander, limitless, without cutting them short, or backing them up, or squeezing them into too-small spaces. (Pg. 27)

Urban/rural preferences aside, Saltwater is beautifully crafted. Andrews meticulously weaves a narrative that unfurls bit by bit, providing more and more information and context to help you build a solid image of the characters. She deals with issues surrounding body image, the affects of alcoholism, and the process of growing up with care and sensitivity. At points I found myself transported back to my own teenage years.

The buzz of hunger wears away at hate. Skirts too tight and skin dimpled in changing room lights. We get bad haircuts and put toothpaste on our spots and we learn the opposite of love. I cannot tell if I am a pear or an apple or an hourglass or even which one I am supposed to want. You tell me it doesn’t matter but I know that it does, even to you. Boyish seems best because boyish means exempt from these things. I am not boyish. I do not want my body to cause a stir. I don’t want it to be the first thing that speaks. (Pg. 147)

As a whole, the book might be classed as a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman. Fans of Sally Rooney, Anna Hope, and Emma Cline would probably find much to enjoy here. It’s definitely one that I’ll eventually buy my own copy of and reread for the sheer pleasure of it.

#8 (2020) Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

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I picked up a copy of Lost Children Archive while I was back home, as I’d been belatedly Christmas-gifted Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, The Horse, The Fox and The Mole and already had a copy. It was one of those impulse purchases as part of a buy one get one half price offer, and I’m hugely glad that I followed the urge!

(Sidebar: if you haven’t already read Mackesy’s The Boy, please go and do so. It is tremendously beautiful and full of important sentiments about being kind to yourself and others.)

A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. This will be the last journey they ever take together.

In Central America and Mexico, thousands of children are on a journey of their own, travelling north to the US border. Not all of them will make it there.

The book is made up of four parts, primarily narrated by the mother in the family. None of the characters are named, which always intrigues me as a reader and and impresses me as a writer. Later in the book, another narrator takes over, and there are also sections of prose taken from a fictional book entitled Elegies for Lost Children. This volume details the migration story of seven children and becomes central to the narrative of Lost Children Archive.

The family comprises of a mother, father, and two children of 10 and 5. One of the most interesting facets of this outwardly ordinary set-up is the professions of the parents. One is a documentarian, the other a documentarist, and both are fundamentally interested in building soundscapes in order to tell a story. The narrative of the book explores their individual story-telling ambitions and how they intersect and diverge. The following extract is taken from early in the book.

My husband and I met four years ago, recording a soundscape of New York City. We were part of a large team of people working for New York University’s Centre for Urban Science and Progress. The soundscape was meant to same and collect all the keynotes and sound marks that were emblematic of the city. (Pg. 2)

One of the key themes Luiselli explores is the migrant crisis. She considers this from a US perspective and specifically focuses on the impact that this has on children, and on the parents of those children. Luiselli writes beautifully throughout, shifting the focus from small details, such as the routines of daily life and the feelings of the narrator, to the bigger picture. Her descriptions of the two children — seemingly eternally in the backseat of the car — are particularly vivid and enjoyable to read.

Then, quite suddenly, she tires of being in the world, becomes quiet, looks out of the window, and says nothing. Perhaps it is in those stretched-out moments in which they meet the world in silence that our children begin to grow apart from us and slowly become unfathomable. Don’t stop being a little girl, I think, but don’t say it. She looks out of the window and yawns. I don’t know what she’s thinking, what she knows and doesn’t know. I don’t know if she sees the same world that we see. (Pg. 139-40)

I love that last line. Children don’t, in my experience, see the world in the same way as adults. They see it through the protective haze of childhood, innocent and buzzing with curiosity. Impossible things are feasible. Their view is coloured by imaginative introspection and is arguably all the richer for it. But, as Luiselli’s novel artfully conveys, not all children have that experience. Not all children have the luxury of that innocence, protection, and care. Not all children get time to be children, which is a particularly devastating truth.

This little snippet review doesn’t do the book justice, but I hope I’ve offered a small insight into why its well worth a read. I think it would appeal to travellers, researchers, and to anyone with a desire to know more about migration. Feel free to share your thoughts below.

P.S. There’s a nice article and interview with Luiselli available here, but be mindful that it’s full of spoilers!

#7 (2020) Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed

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I returned to fiction for my seventh read of the year. I can’t remember how I came across Gather the Daughters, but it was on my wishlist so I added it to my last library order. I still haven’t quite got used to being a member of a public library, and being able to order books in from anywhere in Ireland makes me feel a bit giddy with glee! Anyway, on to the book…

On a small isolated island, there’s a community that lives by its own rules. Boys grow up knowing they will one day take charge, while girls know they will be married and pregnant within moments of hitting womanhood.

But before that time comes, a ritual offers children an exhilarating reprieve. Every summer they are turned out onto their doorsteps, to roam the island, sleep on the beach and build camps in trees. To be free. 

At the end of one of such summer, one of the younger girls sees something she was never supposed to see. And she returns home with a truth that could bring their island world to its knees.

As suggested by Stylist magazine on the cover of the book, Gather the Daughters has the post-apocalyptic flavour of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (well worth a read if you haven’t yet taken the plunge.) The community living on the island believe that the ‘wastelands’ beyond have been destroyed by fire and disease. Island life is primitive, patriarchal, and misogynistic, rooted in fear of upsetting ‘the ancestors’ and going to hell. Women are wives and mothers, nothing more.

That said, I enjoyed the world that Melamed created. It was vivid and believable, and the narrative was convincingly told through the voices of a number of young women on the island. There were flares of rebellion and feminism and I felt emotionally invested in the lives of the characters from very early on. Melamed created a strong sense of time and space, which was heightened as the novel progressed through the four seasons.

On the fifth day of summer the mosquitos come sudden like the rains, except instead of falling from the sky, they rise up from the ground. In veils of humming gold they sweet the landscape, falling to feed from anything with blood in its veins. (Pg. 97)

On the whole, I really enjoyed Gather the Daughters, but I have a gripe with part of the narrative where I felt that Melamed went too far. This is going to be a bit of a spoiler, although there are flavours of this theme from early in the novel. If you’d rather not know, don’t read on. I won’t be discussing anything else after this point.

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Spoilers below

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An addition to the misogyny and general sense of women being worthless, Melamed adds a facet that I found unnecessary and distasteful. One of the key ideas in the novel is that once the girls on the island hit puberty, they have a summer of ritualistic courting and sex with the boys of a similar age, and then settle on one to marry. Inevitably, a child soon follows and the cycle continues. However, before the girls hit puberty and begin menstruation, it is acceptable (and expected) for their fathers to molest/rape/abuse them. And this just sat ill with me. I didn’t feel that the book needed it, and while it contributed to some of the character development I thought that Melamed took it too far. The fact that the abuse/rape is alluded to rather than graphically detailed doesn’t reduce the bad taste left in the mouth by this particular facet of the novel. So, proceed with caution and an awareness of this aspect of the story.

#6 (2020) Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson

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When I picked up Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel in early February I also bought a copy of Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson, which I’d been wanting to read since it was published. It did not disappoint.

I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles.

How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? How do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within these pages, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance. Here is the fierce joy and pain of being alive.

Gleeson’s writing is an absolute joy. Her essays are deeply personal, honest reflections on all aspects of life. She focuses unflinchingly on intimate details about her dealings with illness, and I felt a sense of awe at how much she has had to navigate. At times, Gleeson’s descriptions are exceptionally vivid, which made my squeamish and over-empathetic self squirm in discomfort. Often she is matter of fact about the scars left behind, but at others the poetry of her prose softens the truth of it.

After years of medical procedures my scars are in double figures, but they too form a familiar landscape. Joints can be replaced, organs transplanted, blood transfused, but the story of our lives is still the story of one body. From ill health to heartbreak, we live inside the same skin, aware of its fragility, grappling with our mortality. (Pg. 17. This follows on directly from the extract that opens the blurb above.)

In addition to her medical meditations, Gleeson addresses motherhood throughout the book, frequently highlighting the physical impact of carrying two children and discussing how this affected her body. However, Gleeson also considers motherhood more broadly. Her chapter On the Atomic Nature of Trimesters opens wonderfully, remarking on the woefully outdated expectation that all women should be (or should want to be) mothers. I’d like to quote it all, but here’s a snippet…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a womb and a decent supply of eggs must be in want of a child. […] The urge to procreate and propagate is as arbitrary as any other act of free will, but has been imposed on women like so many other ideals of womanly perfection. Be thin! Be beautiful! Be pregnant! (Pg. 89)

Towards the end of the book, Gleeson offers twenty ‘stories’ (in scare quotations because I found them more like delicate miniature poems) based on the McGill pain index. Gleeson uses the words found in this index as a springboard for her stories, which range in subject matter from the pain of wisdom teeth to that caused by a lumbar puncture. Again, not for the faint hearted!

Possibly the most delicious part of the book is the final chapter, A Non-Letter for my Daughter (named for a warrior queen). It’s a poem, a letter…call it what you will… It’s beautiful and moving in so many ways. It was the sort of thing I read and immediately wanted to copy out and send off to my favourite souls. I’ll leave you with a particularly poignant stanza and the suggestion that you buy a copy of Constellations at your earliest convenience!

Don’t be afraid,
Don’t be fearful.
They are not the same thing.

(Pg. 240)

#5 (2020) Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride

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I had been eagerly anticipating Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel ever since it was announced last year as I absolutely loved her previous two novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians.

At the mid-point of her life a woman enters an Avignon hotel room. She’s been here once before – but while the room hasn’t changed, she is a different person now. 

Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms, from Prague to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last, but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she will negotiate with memory, with the men she sometimes meets, and with what it might mean to return home.

If you haven’t yet read any of McBride’s books, the first thing I’d say is that she is an absolute wordsmith. Her handling of language — both English and Hiberno-English — is fresh and creative. Both of her previous novels deal with very sensitive issues, which she handles with the utmost care. As someone with a closeted desire to be a writer, I am hugely inspired by McBride’s talent and the unique voice she has crafted.

Strange Hotel follows the female protagonist through a series of hotel rooms in different cities, and provides some indication of what happens there. The book reads quite differently to her previous books. The language is arguably more straightforward; McBride describes it as more ‘formal’ in this clip from Faber & Faber. While A Girl and The Lesser Bohemians are both, in their own way, quite introspective novels, Strange Hotel takes this to the next level. The whole work appears to be an internal monologue, rarely broken by external forces. As a result, I found the narrative a little muddy, and wanted more detail about why she was in these different hotel rooms. When I expressed this to a fellow PhDer (and probably the most avid reader I’ve ever met), he expressed surprise that I found Strange Hotel a more challenging read than A Girl. I would be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

Naturally, there were passages where McBride’s prose shone through with particular clarity, and I relished these parts for their sense of familiarity and comfort. This is the Eimear I know and love, I felt. Here, for example…

It is the farthest furthest she has ever been. On a flat earth she would be at the edge. As it is, to go on might be the shortest way home and just let the world fold back on itself. For despite some perplexity regarding her current notions of home — and her periodic declarations that it is simply not so — her belief in the planet’s curve is secure. It is an unbreachable line, and one of the few of which she has ever been sure. (Pg. 78)

What challenged me most, however, was how I felt about the character. Where before I had been moved to the core, here I felt nothing. For all of the introspection and internal dialogue, I felt no connection to the character. Although McBride in her characteristic manner, teases out details a taste at a time, before drawing back the curtain to reveal all, I was little moved. And for me, as an emotionally-driven soul, this was a big let down.

A few days after I finished reading the book I went to an event at the National Concert Hall in Dublin and heard McBride read a passage from the novel. It was a different experience to reading it myself, and it made me hopeful. I’ll give it some time before reading it through again; perhaps my expectations of what the book might have been interfered with what the book was.

If you’ve read the book I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly in relation to her previous two. And if you haven’t read it, please don’t let me put you off! There was a lot of personal feeling invested in this book and, as I say, that may have affected my reading of it.