August Reading — An Embarrassment of Biblio Riches, Part I

Such a wealth of reading, in fact, that I’ve decided for the first time to split my monthly reading post in two, just so that you don’t throw up your hands at the length of a post and leave it parked in a folder “somewhere” to peruse “later.” Because there are some gems among the titles I read last month, and I don’t want you to miss them. I’m not sure what else I managed to do in August, but somehow I read 12 books (many of them genre fiction, lighter and thus quick to finish).

So this is Part One of a two-part August Reading series, with six books in each. As usual, the books are numbered for the order in which I entered them in this year’s Reading Journal, and the italicized entries below are transcribed almost verbatim from that Journal with minor additions in regular font and a few links added.

50. Free Love, Tessa Hadley. Literary fiction; feminist; families; sexuality; women mid-life; London, England ’60s setting; women’s lives.

Couldn’t resist this when I saw it on the New Fiction shelf at the library, even if it bumped others down the list. I’m such a fan of Hadley’s work.

Set in London ’67 (I was there then, at 14, visiting relatives!) — suburban family Fischer is disrupted when the early 20s son of an old friend of Roger (the senior Foreign Office civil servant Head of the Family) comes to dinner, and somehow Phyllis, the pretty, rather bland, early 40s wife and mother finds herself kissing the young man in the dark of the garden, after dinner. An affair begins, but more than that Phyllis begins to see how constrained her life has been — and her experimentation with new possibilities changes not only her own, but also the lives of her teenaged daughter, Colette, and pre-adolescent son dramatically — and her husband’s as well.

Fascinating to watch Hadley work out the possible ramifications in her incremental, psychologically credible, unflinching but quiet way. Points at which we’re perhaps most likely to judge Phyllis harshly end up getting flipped, and it’s hard not to see her foolish selfishness as a naïve but ultimately productive bravery — that transforms her daughter’s life for the better in the long run, arguably.

And given what we learn about Roger’s past life, and what he does with the new freedom he’s now granted, Phyllis’s courage in honouring her own desires and, finally, in taking responsibility for them, is — at least in Hadley’s hands — inspiring and thought-provoking and problematic all at once.

And “free love” — the notion of love’s costs (and who pays them, particularly in terms of gender. . . .The ending. No spoilers but to come back to. . . Roger and Jean, Nicholas. . . and “his brilliant career at the Foreign Office”

Also cleverly observant about the self-indulgent young male intellectuals of the 60s, 70s . . . how much better “free love” was for them. And can Colette, in her late teens, make it work as well for her, trading her youthful attractions for the entrée her older lover will provide for her into the art world?

Of course, the generational rift between Phyllis and Colette, Colette’s temptation to test Nicholas. . .

Class! Together with race represented by one brilliantly solid (and brilliant and even stolid) character, a nurse from Grenada (who had once dreamed of being a doctor) and her cousin, Sam, who refuses to allow himself to be an exotic plaything for a curious and self-indulgent white woman of a certain class and age.

Links to my brief entries about other novels by Hadley: Clever Girl; Late in the Day; and The Past.

51. Force of Nature, Jane Harper. Mystery/Thriller; Police procedural; Aaron Falk series; Australian wilderness setting.

The second Aaron Falk mystery/thriller, again obtained in impressively short time from VPL.

A company that Falk is investigating for fraud sends out a male and a female group of employees (separately) on a team-building “Survivors”-type weekend in the Australian wilderness, and one of the women gets lost — the informant Falk and his female colleague have been waiting to hear from.

Again, setting is a significant character here. The story is told in a Then-Now alternating sequence, with the Then proceeding through the days, chronologically — i.e. Friday evening, Saturday 10 a.m., etc. Intriguing whodunnit puzzle (many possibilities) and entertaining sub-plots along the way. Falk’s character is revealed more, both to readers and to himself.

Instagram post featuring the first two Aaron Falk mysteries (I wrote about the first volume, The Dry, in last month’s bookpost).

52. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. Sonia Shah. NYC: Bloomsbury, 2020. Journalism; Creative Non-Fiction; Eco-Science; Cultural History of Science; Zoology/Botany Classifcation Systems; Migration; Geography; Climate Change.

Shah begins with a description of the checkerspot butterflies she was taken to observe. Assumed to be on the verge of extinction because of their supposed inability to survive outside of a habitat affected by climate change, they defied their description as “sedentary” and were found to have gradually extended their range into a higher elevation, adapting to new host plant species.

She then sets out a cultural history of Science which was based in the utter conviction that species are bound by geographic locales and that migration is disruptive and dangerous. Convincingly demonstrates the ways that this supposed knowledge continued to be bolstered against any emerging contradictory evidence, which tended to be suppressed or derided (such as, for example, much of Darwin’s work). Linnaeus codified biological (botanical) systems so that they conformed with what he already believed — he would have said “knew” — to be true.

Brilliant example of the lemmings — which so many of us were taught had a suicidal drive. In fact, sloppy science and Disney’s staged (and fake) documentary are responsible for this widespread understanding. Further, rather astonishingly, lemming populations seem to disappear because they hibernate under the snow.

Shah argues (and demonstrates convincingly) that this faulty and biased science, based so heavily in a colonial/colonizing mentality, continues to influence general thinking and public policy about “wild aliens” and about human migration.

And Shah pulls together many examples of migration (in animals and plants, and in humans) as a positive and beneficial response to climate change. As well, she demonstrates how misguided are the enforced borders that many nations are erecting in response — both in ways they harm wildlife and plants, halting population-saving movement. And in the ways these policies deny us the many benefits that integration of “aliens” offer human society/economy.

Recommended. Thought-provoking, persuasive. Impressively researched. I say a bit more of the same in my Instagram post.

53. The Messy Lives of Book People. Phaedra Patrick. Genre fiction; Biblio-fiction; Romance; Mystery.

By the same author as The Library of Lost and Found and I’d rate it the same way. Very light, pleasantly entertaining unless you find it too Hallmark movie-ish. It was too close to that for me, but I did read to the end. A few proof-reading/editing errors that made an irritating difference (wrong name in one case and a confusion about a misplaced phone in another). I should probably stick to mysteries for my preferred escapist genre.

54. The Promise. Damon Galgut. Literary fiction; Booker prize-winner; South African society/politics during and after apartheid system.

Finally got around to reading this Booker winner (I gave a copy to Z. at Christmas — wonder if he’s read it yet). It’s not an easy novel (the subject matter alone precludes that possibility) but such an intriguing narrative voice. The book is structured around the period comprising four deaths — and the collapse of apartheid — in a white South African family. The title comes from a promise the youngest sibling — barely into her adolescence — overhears her father make to her dying mother, at her mother’s urgent and repeated request: that he would give their household servant (cook, cleaner, and caregiver to the three children for over 20 years) the deed to the little cabin she occupies.

This daughter spends the next two decades trying to get her family to honour this promise, but moves out of touch for most of this time, unable to bear the injustice she sees, her family’s unwillingness to give up their unearned privilege.

Both her older brother and her sister waste/destroy their own lives as a consequence of this unwillingness / inability . . . and by the time . . . But no, I mustn’t spoil the ending.

As for that narrative voice, such a brilliant achievement — somehow detached and yet intensely invested and knowing at once. A voice that tells the reader, addressing us directly in the second person occasionally — guiding us to look here or there, telling us what this or that character is thinking, and doing so with a startling effect, gliding from here to there, dipping into and out of another consciousness. Reminds me of Joyce . . .

And the narrative voice colludes with readers. An example, a character “has a cat curled up on her lap. No, she doesn’t, there is no cat. But allow her a couple of plants at least.” And earlier, speaking of a homeless, sometimes delusional man: “there’s no reason to accompany him and, come to think of it, there never was. Why is he obscuring our view, this unwashed, raggedy man, demanding sympathy . . . how did he waste our time with his stories . . . how self-centred of him. . . . Pay him no further mind.”

So much more to think and say about this book, but I’ll stop here. If you’ve read it, I’d love to know what you thought .

55. The Heights. Louise Candlish. Mystery; Domestic thriller; Set in London; Marriage; Parenting; Family Life; Adolescence.

A taut domestic thriller, told from two perspectives, that of the mother and then that of the father (parents have remained friends but are no longer a couple) of a young student (on the cusp of manhood) killed in the company of a friend the parents have seen as a bad influence. The mother, in fact, telling the story in first-person narrative for the first long portion of the book, regards the friend as pure Evil. After Lucas’s death, as the mother becomes single-minded in her grief and her desire for revenge, her husband (Lucas’s stepfather) and Lucas’s sister struggle for their wife/mother’s attention, but she reaches out to his father, Vic, as someone who will understand her thirst for justice.

And when we finally hear the story from Vic’s perspective, things get a bit more complicated. . . . Twist after twist, who’s lying? Who’s telling the truth? “Who’s dangerous?” We can’t be entirely sure until the very end. And even then . . .

56. Belle Merveille. James Noël. Literary fiction; en français (not yet translated into English, malheuresement); Haiti; earthquake; disaster; celebration of Haitian culture.

I read this book by Haitian poet/writer James Noël after seeing a poster featuring a portrait of him accompanied by an excerpt from one of his poems when Jennifer took us on a walk near Musée Cluny in Paris a few years ago. That, in turn, led me to do a presentation on him and his work for a French class summer before last (the 2020 pandemic summer, Zoom class) . . .which inspired me to buy this novel.

Published in 2017, it is narrated by a survivor of Haiti’s disastrous earthquake of 2010 . . . who meets Amore, an Italian (Neapolitan) woman, one of the many NGO workers that descend on the country in the wake of the earthquake. Caustic and lyrical, angry and distraught, celebratory of his country’s culture and beauty and potential resources but despairing of its potential for any advancement as long as it continues to be exploited by wealthier countries. Parasitized by these supposed saviours who live off all the grants fund-raised in the name of the disaster.

His coup de foudre for Amore, though, looks past her role as NGO and the intense physicality of their relationship becomes defies the otherwise undeniable death and destruction around them. And not only do they escape this way, but also in a flight to Rome, which allows a new perspective, a new “mappemonde” graçe à “Ici-Bas Airlines” (or Here to There Airlines).

Exhilarating style, language, imagery — dizzying in parts, even with my limited French I can discern this. Noel’s narrative is as close to long prose poem as to novel in places. Dazzling wordplay, onomatopoeia. Took me almost two years to finish this brilliant, slim book (I admittedly have been putting more energy into reading Italian and/or have chosen more easily digested French novels). But it’s well worth the challenge, even if a tentative reader merely savours reading a sequence of pages for sound or imagery.

Okay, those are the first six books I want to share with you from my August reading, and I’ll be sending out the second post very soon, perhaps even tomorrow. Because I’m splitting this month’s bookpost into two parts, I’m asking you to hold off sharing what you’re reading until Part II, so that we can have all of those recommendations in one place. But feel free to comment here about any of the books I’ve written about today — or about whether you find it helpful to have the post divided this way OR would have preferred a single post, even if it would have been very long.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

xo,

f