Read 5 of 2023. Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

Learning to Talk is a book that marvels, that makes you infer, come up with connections of your own to Mantel’s memoir. “Giving Up the Ghost”, and finally makes you marvel at how she connected these stories to moments from her childhood, to give us an experience like no other.

The stories in this collection are raw, precise, part memoir, part imagination, and all wonderful with sentences that flow and words that fit seamlessly. This book is about teenagers and children who are odd with their families, neighbours, the school, and the world at large. Each story laced with curiosity, cleverness, and different ways of seeing the world.

Mantel through these stories allows the reader to glimpse into her world and life growing up and yet ensures that there is some distance that is always maintained between how much she wants the reader to know and how much she does not.

Each story is about when a child’s life shifts – what moments define it – when a pet dies, when the child is lost and finds itself eventually, a teenager’s realization about what love is and how adults work in the world, and about how daughters come to view their mothers over a period. Mantel doesn’t let go of any emotion – of each sentence being in the place it must.  

And in all this there are times when she draws on history to tell these stories and that’s when each one comes alive with even more exuberance and nuance. There is attention to detail, there is attention to every heartache, melancholy, and the political and personal mingle in all the specifics of time and place.

Learning to Talk is a delightful read that will stay with me for years to come. I may not recall every story but that will then be the perfect time to reread this collection.

Read 4 of 2023. Bliss Montage : Stories by Ling Ma

I hadn’t read “Severance” but then I decided to read this collection of short stories and will most certainly go and read her novel. The stories in this collection are surreal, funny, satirical, and extremely confident, though not all of them, but they do the job of making the reader think, feel, and be surprised as well with every turn of the page.

We meet Chinese American women trying so hard, processing their dislocation, their loneliness and how to make sense of the world they are thrown into. In “G” two friends want to relive their youth by going all-out into the night. “Office Hours”, “Peking Duck”, and “Tomorrow” are laced with an equal amount of humour and empathy. “Peking Duck” will make you relook at ethics and what it means to be moral – and more than anything about how narratives change, and so do narrators.

“Los Angeles” and “Yeti Lovemaking” were my favourite stories from the lot. They are peculiar, wry, and stuns you into thinking about other worlds. Her stories stay with you – with their jagged edges and imperfect threads. They exist for that reason alone – to make you see how these characters navigate life and the world at large, unpredictable in their ways, and often quite hilarious.

Read 234 of 2021. Love and Fury by Samantha Silva

Title: Love and Fury
Author: Samantha Silva
Publisher: Flatiron Books 
ISBN: 978-1250159113
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction 
Pages: 288 
Source: Publisher 
Rating: 4/5 

A novel about Mary Wollstonecraft is always going to get my attention. Always. Mary Wollstonecraft has always been a favourite of mine – I think the sheer verve and joy with which she lived her life, despite the hardships and a long struggle fighting for women’s rights, is what captivated me toward her way of living.

Love and Fury by Samantha Silva opens at the end of Wollstonecraft’s life, as she is about to give birth to the infant who will become Mary Shelley. The book is told in alternate chapters. One by Wollstonecraft speaking to her daughter, charting her life for her. The other is told through Mrs B’s perspective and also about her life being a midwife.

Two women from very different walks of life and how it all comes together in one book. I love the way this book is written, though it does get repetitive in some parts, and yet so fulfilling. Mary’s life however does take center-stage a lot more.

Silva’s writing is interesting, the characters are humane, the voice is empathetic, and more than anything else even though you are reading a historical novel, you feel that it could be set today and be relevant. It is sad but does hold some truth.

Love and Fury is literary, it is philosophical, it speaks of stories of people in the most unassuming manner – all of it through losses, loves, and keeps you hooked through and through.

 

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Title: A Single Man
Author: Christopher Isherwood
Publisher: Picador Modern Classics
ISBN: 978-1250239372
Genre: LGBT Classic Fiction, LGBT Fiction,
Pages: 240
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5 stars

Literature can save you; they say. Literature heals. Literature mends a broken heart, and literature also hurts. Literature takes a part of you and has the capacity to rip it apart as well. That’s the power of literature too.

 A Single Man is a reread for me. I think I read it again for the fourth time or so. I first read it in 2002 I think or was it 2003? I don’t remember the year. Sometime then, I suppose. Anyway, I then watched the film in 2009 and my heart was a mess. It was a wreck when I read the book and the movie did its bit as well. Of ruining and moving on.

 A Single Man when read in the 30s gives you a totally different perspective of what life might be as you age, and that too for a gay man. It will not be easy. The book set in 1962, tells the story of George – a middle-aged Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles university. It is a circadian novel (one that spans through a day), and a very effective one at that.

In all of this, the book takes us through George’s life – sometimes as a gay man, sometimes more than that, sometimes just as a man who is lonely and yearns for company, and at others a man who is almost done with the world and not quite so. Isherwood’s writing is fulfilling, brutal, and very real.

For instance, this depiction of two men who are lovers and living together, is perfect. One might think it is written so simply and yet it conjures so many images:

“Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!”

A Single Man is a story of two Georges as well. The one who wants to say so much, and the one who doesn’t. The book is full of internal monologues – his life sometime in the past and in the present. I think the time in which the book is set is also so indicative of everything that was homophobic, xenophobic, and yet professing free love to the moon and back.

Isherwood writes as an insider, and yet it always seems he is an outsider looking in – maintaining a perfect balance, a dance almost, with wit intact, and prose that is poignant to the brim. The question of death and life are the core of this most beautifully rendered novel. It addresses bigger issues of loneliness and isolation, seen through the lens of a gay man is purely coincidental. There is also a lot of self-loathing for just being who he is that made my heart go out to George.

A Single Man is a book that needs to be looked at very closely – without bias, and read over and over again to make true sense of what Isherwood wants to tell us – of what it is to be single and left out, in a room full of people – in a world that is too crowded.

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

Title: A Small Place
Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 978-0374527075
Genre: Nonfiction, Jamaica Caribbean & West Indies History, Memoir
Pages: 81
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

So, this is my first Kincaid read, and all thanks to the 2020 Reading Women Challenge. Their first prompt is an author from Caribbean or India. Since I’ve read a lot of women from India, I thought let’s give the Caribbean a shot and started with A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid – a rather short, but extremely powerful and engaging book about colonialism and its effects in Antigua. There were so many things I wasn’t aware about Antigua till I read A Small Place, and like I said I was only too happy to read something out of my comfort zone and thereby discover the writing of an author I had intended to read for a while.

A Small Place is a memoir, it is also a history of Antigua in a way, it is also an essay of anger against the people who colonised Antigua, it is also a voice of great empathy that Kincaid has for her country and people. The book begins with an attack on tourists who visit Antigua – what they expect and choose to see versus what the place is.

A Small Place is a short book – but extremely powerful and angry. Kincaid writes about home – about what it meant to her, and what has become of it. Of how the English ruled them, and how their independence has only worsened the situation because of corruption and bureaucracy. Jamaica Kincaid speaks candidly – almost to the point of being brutal – there are no holds barred. The prose comes from an extremely personal space and therefore the writing shines the way it does.

For instance, when she speaks of lack of clean water in the country or even about the beloved old library that was destroyed in an earthquake and how nothing was done to build the new one. And now that there is a new one that has been built (way after the book was published), but there is still doubt if it is open to public or not.

Kincaid’s book is large – very large not only in its scope but also in what it has to say – and how she manages to say it in all in less than hundred pages is nothing short of a feat. That explains the writer she is – succinct, bare-boned, and yet so deeply emotional that every emotion is reflected on paper, and in turn is felt by the reader.