I’ve made a breakthrough in my reading – I read more than I have been recently. Part of it was intention, making more time for it, part was picking a good mix of books, and part of it was finally getting it into my head that my rabbits are perfectly happy for me to sit and read around them rather than actively paying them attention. My cats were never like that; there has been a learning curve.

Towards the end of the month, I found comfort in easy reading – the Eloisa James made it to this month’s list and I’ve three other books on the go, including Mrs Dalloway; now on my fourth attempt, I’m getting through it. I’m happy that the numbers are higher and it’s made a long week more positive. I spent the last evening of the month watching Enchanted April, the 1992 adaptation of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s book, and highly recommend it.

All books are works of fiction.

The Books

Eloisa James: A Kiss At Midnight – A Cinderella retelling, in a fantasy early 1800s, a young woman agrees to pretend to be her half-sister in order to gain a relative’s approval for a marriage; the relative is a prince. A fun historical romance retelling, with just a couple of devices to better align it to the original.

Maggie O’Farrell: This Must Be The Place – An American in Ireland struggles with his history, which includes two families and a dependence on alcohol; the various members of his families struggle with their own lives and pasts, including his second wife, a famous actress two decades before who ran away to Ireland in order to escape the life she hadn’t wanted. Difficult to follow at times but the literary elements are very compelling.

Nick Alexander: You Then, Me Now – Becky has been trying all her life to get her mother, Laura, to tell her about her father. She manages to get her mother to holiday with her where the romance started; Laura has always found the idea of telling her daughter the truth difficult due to the trauma associated with that time. The only thing that doesn’t work is the resolution which is contrived; this is a very good book in general with superb characterisation and theme work.

Sally Rooney: Conversations With Friends – Two lovers-turned-friends meet an affluent couple and become embroiled in their chaotic marriage. The story itself is average but as this book isn’t so much about story as it is everything else that makes up a novel, the whole is really rather good.

I enjoyed all four books immensely for different reasons. The James: an easy read and a very good book of its genre; O’Farrell: the use of literary styles and the playing with linguistics; Alexander: the way it went about depicting the impacts of emotional abuse on a young person, later resulting in sexual abuse; Rooney: the methods used to show feelings and the effects of depression.

Quotation Report

In Conversations With Friends, the narrator ponders the idea of kindness, whether it’s more about being nice in the face of conflict, and whether she only wonders whether she’s kind because she’s a woman. Whilst in This Must Be The Place, a teenager, new to the age group, discovers one of the changes that come with moving away from childhood, that lack of total oneness of self and the innocence of a child in regards to the rest of the world and life.

My immediate plan is to finish Mrs Dalloway which shouldn’t take too long given its relatively short length and my progress. I then plan to move on to a book that arrived in the post, and follow that with whatever takes my fancy.

Did you watch any adaptations this month?

A little more conversation, a little less action please.

Publisher: Faber & Faber
Pages: 319
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-571-33312-7
First Published: 25th May 2017
Date Reviewed: 25th September 2019
Rating: 4/5

On an evening they had performed Frances’ poetry, Frances and her ex-girlfriend-now-friend Bobbi meet Melissa, a published writer who wants to write an article about them. They go to her house; they meet her husband, Nick; they are in awe of the couple’s wealth. The marriage seems unstable. As the acquaintance deepens, Frances’ interest in the semi-famous Nick increases – he seems someone who ‘gets’ her, likes her, for all her lack of personality.

Conversations With Friends is a book about personality in the sense of identity; feminism; power and control; parental abuse and neglect; and mental illness.

Frances is an interesting choice of narrator; it’s a choice that has made the novel the success it is, whilst at the same time it’s almost baffling. It’s all quite clever. Frances is boring; she says she has no personality but really it’s more that she just doesn’t do much. She has a fair bit going for her, including what is described by those around her as a talent for writing, and overall success academically, but she tends to simply follow the directions and choices of others. And, interestingly here, it’s not that others are actively making choices for her – life just happens to her. The concept of no personality was Bobbi’s, and Frances writes as though she’s taken it to heart as simple fact. Frances is a reliable narrator, just a bit of a non-entity; this allows Rooney to put emphasis on people who have fuller lives, who are more passionate, driven, than the narrator. The lack of a personality is something that is pretty belaboured throughout. It’s more of a ‘true’ character voice rather than anything authorial.

Rooney has chosen to tell her story using subtle means, her choices for Frances only extending that. The book requires a lot of attention, more than is obvious – it’s the sort of novel that likely needs a re-read to fully understand because the ‘aha!’ moments happen so late. Conversations With Friends effectively has a layer of depression covering it, like a layer of thick fog you have to see past, get through, work through, in order to appreciate the content, and that takes time. In terms of literary style it’s incredible, this effective fog that you wouldn’t notice just by reading a page or two; so much has gone into it – the words, the content, the place Rooney is coming from – the best way I can describe it is that it’s like the feeling that there’s something between you and the words on the page, a block that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the text, and nothing in regards to anything the text lacks. The experience of reading this book felt, to me, a bit like the experience of reading The Bell Jar, only the depression wasn’t from the characters’ minds as such, and in terms of Rooney it’s only to do with stylistic choices. It’s also not as difficult to read as Plath’s book nor similar.

To him my arm was not important. He was only concerned with making his child feel bad, making her feel ashamed (p. 268).

Conversations With Friends is about depression, generally without use of the word, and not being able to make heads nor tails of life; this, especially, is where Nick comes into the story. Frances’ upbringing wasn’t good, and this has resulted in a lack of self. In fact, Frances’ parents have a lot to answer for. Emotional abuse and neglect is all over this book. Frances’ father has his own problems and her mother often criticises her and tells her what to do as though she’s younger than she is. Frances never seems as old as her peers, and the divide makes a lot more sense when her mother is in a scene.

He told me he thought helplessness was often a way of exercising power (p. 246).

As the book moves into its final pages (though this number is fairly large as the chapters are long), Rooney lifts some of the fog to let you better see what’s going on. This is where some ‘telling’ comes in and it’s unfortunate because, as excellently crafted as the fog is, if it wasn’t for the fog, Rooney’s explanations wouldn’t be so glaring. The content of this section brings into focus the idea of power and control – particularly in relationships – the power seemingly passive people can have over others.

To introduce the feminism:

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone (p. 176).

Conversations With Friends is subtle but far from unenjoyable – in a slightly studious and highly literary way, it has a lot to recommend it.

How do short stories and novels compare to you?

It makes sense to first consider the question of whether or not you like short stories. And, if you do like them, what are the similarities and differences that you appreciate between them?

I enjoy short stories. I like the way the need to be succinct often results in a better, tighter, story and writing in general. But I’m undecided as to the way it can take you (me, in this case) longer to ascertain background contexts, moods and so on – the details novels have time to sprinkle over numerous pages – due to that need for everything to be concise. It takes more time, literally, in terms of mental energy, to ‘learn’ everything you need to understand in order to appreciate a short story; even though you learn throughout a novel, it’s slower. In a short story you learn more, often right up to the end, in a way you don’t when reading a novel, and the whole way through the short story the learning is both prominent and very obvious – there are more ‘aha!’ moments. A novel needs a certain amount of focus. A short story needs more and if you’re reading a collection this focus needs reigning in over and over again, starting from the start again and again – supposing the stories are short enough that you read more than one in a sitting. The foresight of knowing I’ll have to refocus forms a small part of why I don’t read many collections.

How do writer’s novels compare to their short stories? I tend to find myself looking forward to a novel after a writer debuts with a collection I’ve enjoyed; I look forward in a chronologically backwards manner to stories of writer’s whose novel I’ve read first. I’m thinking here of Maile Meloy – I started with her novella; her first publication was a collection, then she released the novella and its sequel, and returned with another collection. I read her first collection last. Likewise, though looking forward this time, I was hopeful that Jessie Greengrass would publish a novel after her collection: she did; Orlando Ortega-Medina did too, recently, following his excellent collection.

Do we expect writers to move on to novels? Is a novel more ‘real’ in terms of literature?

And what about collections of stories on one theme or stories that are linked in other ways? I’m thinking here of Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours; when looking at the collections on my shelves I almost missed this one because the characters and themes are close enough to make you think, once the text is no longer fresh in your mind, that the collection is actually a novel.

How do short stories and novels compare to you?

I recently set aside a few hours to go through every post on the blog that contained a book title, checking links. It’s the sort of blog maintenance job that takes time even if you’ve done it before; regardless of the fact there will be new links to check in terms of time always moving forward, you inevitably miss links – I fully expect to find a couple of ‘old’ links next time I do it. These are the mulling-it-over results:

I found myself a bit embarrassed by some posts, the lack of experience I had at the time showing through. In addition to general content, I’d spelt a number of titles wrong.

It made me nostalgic, especially about the books I read before I started blogging, books I wish I had reviewed. It would be impossible to review them now; I may have to go back to a few that I know would make good discussions.

Despite trying my best not to repeat topics – at most I’ll write spin offs or follow-ups – I saw that I had repeated once or twice, though there was more content in the later repetitions. It’s one of the issues with headings – if you go through your posts to check whether you’ve covered a topic you won’t always find a clear answer because you may have worded it differently in the past.

I’ve written about Persuasion a fair amount but have never reviewed it. I didn’t enjoy it much either of the two times I read it but I’m not sure why I didn’t review it.

If you’re a blogger and have been for at least a few years I recommend going back to your own older posts. The potential embarrassment is worth it for the feelgood factor of learning it provides.

I would love to hear your own experiences of going back over things you’ve written, or similar – it doesn’t have to be writing – if there’s one thing that’s evident it’s that hearing about lessons others have learned can help the next person learn quicker.

Hopefully it is.

Publisher: Tinder Press (Headline)
Pages: 483
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-755-35880-9
First Published: 17th May 2016
Date Reviewed: 13th September 2019
Rating: 3.5/5

Daniel is outside; across the fields he spots a man who may have a camera. When he tells his wife she grabs a gun. Living in the middle of nowhere in Ireland, the American is generally used to his wife’s reactions, born as they are from her past. In addition to this – even though it’s a particularly compelling aspect of his life story – there is more, the children back in America and the father he doesn’t want to see.

This Must Be The Place is a novel of multiple subplots and narrators which stretches from the 1980s to the 2010s with a brief trip to the 1940s. An effective family saga in one book, it’s more about the journey of the people and their relationships than any destination.

This book is the sort that will either enthrall you or frustrate you – it’s incredibly literary, the artistry itself the mainstay rather than the content. Daniel, one of the many characters, has built his career on his love of linguistics, and to an extent O’Farrell herself has adopted the study of the subject to use in this book. A lot of the time, the writing is poetry in prose; O’Farrell uses language both for its art and for its characters, with Daniel, the only first-person narrator, the one through which most of her passion has been funneled. You know he’s American, this Daniel who’s in Donegal, Ireland, before he tells you, his dialect matching his home country, the first hint of the linguistics to come.

O’Farrell’s play with linguistics extends to her chapter headings – phrases taken from the main body of the chapter in question; the book’s title is also in the text, as a line of dialogue. It’s an interesting feature because whilst the phrases chosen tend to provide you with a hint of what’s to come, they aren’t always ‘clever’, so to speak, O’Farrell showing a range of concepts that can be used to both similar and differing results. (One chapter is but a series of photos and captions, a fictional auction catalog.) All do, however, link back to the idea of poetry, of meaning in the simplest of phrases. And, most often, you can spot the effort made in each line. It’s all rather stunning.

The characters themselves, away from the artistry, are well written and developed. Development is limited in the traditional sense due to the plethora of people involved: Daniel and the children, and Claudette, his wife, are developed both over the course of the years written about and those before the book begun; the other characters mostly in terms of what came before. None of the adults are particularly nice. The children are pretty great, especially given the variety of poor hands their lives and parents have shown them. But the adults… whilst O’Farrell has indeed created real, believable people, and whilst they have some good traits, they’re difficult to read about, which is another reason this book is about the experience rather than anything else.

To look at the possibility for frustration, then: likely, if you haven’t read the book, are reading this (and have potentially read the views of others), and have weighed up the content in terms of your own interests, you’ll probably have a good idea by this point whether you’ll like it or not. The plot is pretty well formed and, for the number of characters, very detailed, but you do have to piece it all together yourself, and as much as it’s arty is also just a literary device. And sometimes, having to piece it together lessens the impact certain aspects may have. To be sure, not all of them – some of them have a lot of impact regardless of how they’ve been woven through the pages, brief moments that take up mere lines being perhaps what you’ll remember most – but a lot will lose their impact. Chronological order would’ve been better.

On that note of impacts that do work regardless, they relate to up-to-the-minute occurrences. Agency and consent in the medical sphere; gun violence in American cities, written in a way that shows both how awful it is and how usual, now, an occurrence. Then there is the domestic sphere, the family saga aspect evident in the theme of children: conversations and concepts over having them, the effects of the past – things before they were born – on those children, and various parental issues and rights.

There are also a few extra characters that dilute the plot a bit, some familial – presumably included for more background and to show how problems can continue in families – and one in particular that seems to have no bearing on anything else, a person used to show Daniel in a different way where it might have been best to make the chapter another of his first-persons. You also end the book with questions that aren’t resolved, some whole points on their own, others minor details that would nevertheless have rounded it all off further. And for all the characters, one or two aren’t included that may have better explained those that are included.

So, no, not really escapist. Not your usual idea of reading for escape, for fun – the fun is under that more studious, literary, definition.

    Anyway, the older, longer, sluggish Marithe had looked up at the stars [decorative, on the ceiling] and asked her mother, who was sitting in the char opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it?
    Claudette had put down her book and thought for a moment. And then she said: probably not, my darling girl, because what you’re describing comes of growing up but you get something else instead. You get wisdom, you get experience. Which could be seen as a compensation, could it not?
Marithe felt those tears prickling at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.
    For Calvin, she feels a simultaneous jealousy and pity. He sill has it, that wholeness, that verve. There he is, on the trampoline, completely on the trampoline, not worrying about anything, not thinking, but now what? Or: what if? Pity, because she knows now he’ll g through it. He’ll have to lose several skins; he’ll wake up one day wearing new, invisible glasses (p.456).

This Must Be The Place is a time investment – a long novel, one needing your attention. In terms of its genre, over all the payoff is worth it (certainly I enjoyed it a lot) but it’s not without its problems.