BOOK REVIEWS
Looking for something new to read? Have a scroll through these bite-size book reviews
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION
OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
A novel for anyone who’s ever wished they could make it all stop, and crawl into the false friend of the daytime duvet. Through use of flashbacks, monthly visits to the world’s most irresponsible psychiatrist and attempted interventions by another troubled friend, Mosfegh achieves the feat of a compelling novel with a mainly unconcious hero. This is a protagonist you’ll despise and empathise with in (almost) equal measure. She is both wealthy and self-obsessed, but also grieving the sudden death of her parents and is starkly alone. It's an unconventional addition to fiction exploring urban isolation, where the New Yorker's self-medicated blackouts are a darkly comic counterpoint to the 'city that never sleeps'.
THINGS I DON'T WANT TO KNOW
DEBORAH LEVY
My second introduction to Levy after tearing through her Booker shortlisted Hot Milk, and the beginning of an enduring (one-way) love affair. A response to Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’, this fragmentary memoir pulls you along with its lyrical perspectives on heartbreak, creativity and depression. Her confused sense of identity as a child emigrating from Apartheid South Africa to England is masterfully portrayed with use of sparing but haunting detail. There’s a hint of Henry James’ celebrated What Maisie Knew where the perspective of a child shows more than an adult could tell.
ORDINARY PEOPLE
DIANA EVANS
A concise portrait of four lives that, like all of ours, could have gone in different directions. Like Tessa Hadley's Late in the Day, published the month before, this book follows two sets of London-based couples where misplaced passions silently undo their original pairings. Through each of her lead characters, Evans portrays variations on the suffocating stagnation that can develop as your life choices cement themselves around you. The style tends towards the self-conscious at times, with a penchant for clause after winding clause, strung together with perhaps one too many adjectives. However, the sense of entrapment is deftly created and there is a standout episode towards the book’s end (interestingly, on London's gang culture rather than focussed on any of the leads) which left me genuinely lost for breath.
AMERICANAH
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
This epic novel follows childhood sweethearts, Ifemelu and Obinze as life takes them in different directions, away from their native Lagos. Set between Nigeria, England and America, Adichie has a startling knack for articulating the social dynamics and behaviours of different cultures and professions, aided by excerpt’s from Ifemelu’s hugely successful blog on being a non-American black in America. The result are characters that are both idiosyncratic and utterly recognisable, with every page offering another gem of observational comedy - or tragedy.
THE SCIENCE OF STORYTELLING
WILL STORR
This is a destabilising book in the best sense. If you've ever wondered at your brain's immense abilitity sort myriad events into some sort of narrative, this deep dive will startle and excite you in equal measure. In short, our reality is much less certain than we are hardwired to believe. And yet stories join diverse ages, people and cultures in their mysteriously repeating patterns. If nothing else, the argument for the essential nature of storytelling will make you think the next time you're gathered around a pub table, demanding "And then what happened?!" to your friend's priceless anecdote.
HOW TO FAIL
ELIZABETH DAY
On the back of her hit podcast with the same name, journalist and author Elizabeth Day explores the hypothesis that it is through failure that we find - and appreciate - success. The audiobook version is a particularly good format here, as it includes soundbites from Day’s interviewees, threading their thoughts into wider thematic chapters: How to Fail at Relationships/Families/Work etc. While the podcast centres on a different ‘successful’ person each episode, the book turns the focus onto Day, who is particularly honest on a subject that affects so many but still receives very little public commentary: fertility issues and the challenges of IVF. Day’s discussion of the language of failure that is deployed at women attempting to conceive - ‘inhospitable womb’, ‘incompetent cervix’ ‘your body has failed to respond to the drugs’ - is particularly thought- (and rage-) provoking.
CHESIL BEACH
IAN MCEWAN
Virginia Woolf once said that ‘from a fleeting phrase you can construct a lifetime’. McEwan is a master of turning from a single moment to its macro meanings and pulsating consequences for the life (or lives) to follow. On Chesil Beach hinges on young couple Edward and Florence and their ill-fated wedding night. The text takes us only a few steps from their coastal hotel room to the beach down below, but the accompanying flashbacks and flashforwards shroud the night in a volatile mix of inevitability, bitter regret and the eventual dimming of pain through time.