Month: May 2024

“I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike.” (Queen)

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My final novella of May is And the Wind Sees All by Guðmundur Andri Thorsson (2011, transl. Björg Árnadóttir and Andrew Cauthery 2018), published by the ever-reliable Peirene Press.

The entire novel takes place within two minutes: the time it takes Kata, conductor of the village choir, to cycle down the main street of Valeryi in her polka dot dress.

“Everything is singing in the bright light. The sun sings, the sea, fish, telegraph poles, cows, flies, horses, dogs, the old red bicycle Kalli and Sidda gave her. She feels the day will come when her brown hair will once again have its red lustre. Once again her eyes will sparkle. Once again she’ll sing inside herself as she plays the clarinet. Once again there will be life in her existence. Once again she will be loved.”

We don’t find out why Kata has lost her sparkle until towards the end of the novella. In the meantime, as the residents of the northern Icelandic village see her go by, we get glimpses of their lives and a picture of the community.

The chapters are told from different people’s viewpoints but characters recur – as they would in such a small community – along with images and themes, weaving the fragmentary experiences into a whole.

One of the most harrowing stories belongs to Svenni, and yet his chapter begins quite lightly:

“Svenni lives in one of those houses that look like a man with his trousers hitched up far too high – a little house on big foundations.”

We learn that reticent “good bloke” Svenni, a surprise participant in the choir, has traumatic reasons for keeping himself to himself.

There are lighter moments too, such as Lalli the Puffin being so-called because he owns the Puffin restaurant, but also because “he struts and darts his eyes around like an inquisitive puffin. The villagers are all familiar with his distinctive waddle and smile to themselves when they see him.”

And there are moments in between, like the fragile reunion of two middle-aged people who had been teenage lovers back when they “presented their pain to each other” and are now taking a walk.

The coastal Icelandic setting of the fictional village is beautifully evoked throughout:

“The village is not just the movement of the surf and a life of work, the clattering of a motorboat, or dogs that lie in the sun with their heads on their paws. It’s not only the smell of the sea, oil, guano, life and death, the fish and the funny house names. It’s also a chronicle that moves softly through the streets, preserving in elemental image of the village created piece by piece over the course of centuries.”

The back of my copy refers to “relaxing Nordic hygge in a novel” – I disagree. And the Wind Sees All is not a harrowing novel but it’s not escapist either. There are villagers with traumatic pasts, there is self-medicating with alcohol, there is addiction and heartbreak.  There’s also love and friendship. Thorsson shows how these experiences sit amongst a beautiful village, where the community is coming together for a choir concert. It all exists simultaneously, within the two minutes of Kata’s bike ride.

“Santa Claus has the right idea – visit people only once a year.” (Victor Borge)

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I received my copy of The Visitor by Maeve Brennan (written in the 1940s, published after her death in 2000) from lovely Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, having read her wonderful review. I’d not read Brennan before and I was really keen to; having now read this 81 page novella I definitely want to explore her writing further.

Twenty-two year old Anastasia King returns to her grandmother’s house in Dublin, having spent six years in Paris with her mother who has now died.

“She was still the same, with her delicate and ruminative and ladylike face, and her hands clasped formerly in front of her. Anastasia thought, She is waiting for me to make some mistake.”

Little does Anastasia know she has already made the mistake by leaving with her mother. Her grandmother is entirely unforgiving and inflexible about the hurt caused to her son who has also died, and makes no allowances for Anastasia having been the child of the marriage.

Anastasia expects to be able to live with her grandmother as she has nowhere else to go, but her grandmother has other ideas. She does not view this house as Anastasia’s home any longer and is determined to keep her in the titular role. Her imperviousness and lack of welcome border on Gothic and I was reminded of Janet in O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker. The Visitor lacks the overt Gothic tones of that novel but they share the dislocation of a young adult in her own home and the almost eeriness that evokes.

“She turned and looked at the mirror, but it reflected only empty chairs, and the firelight played indifferently on polished furniture as it had once across her parents’ faces. There is the background, and it is exactly the same.”

Her grandmother’s elderly housekeeper Katharine does her best to welcome Anastasia, but her kindness is vastly outweighed by Mrs King’s seemingly endless bitterness. Brennan adds complexity to the tale with the introduction of old family friend Miss Kilbride. Anastasia’s actions towards Miss Kilbride stop the story becoming fairytale-like or straightforward. By portraying human beings in all their complexities Brennan doesn’t allow trite conclusions to be reached.

I don’t want to say too much about the novella as it’s so short, but its length doesn’t mean it lacks power. The loveless, withholding atmosphere that Mrs King creates is masterfully drawn and really gets under the reader’s skin. The ending is ambiguous and adds to the feeling of dislocation throughout the story. Brennan doesn’t waste a single word.

“Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness.”

“Being the owner of Dachshunds, to me a book on dog discipline becomes a volume of inspired humour.” (EB White)

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I might not have picked up Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment (2009) ordinarily, but it is published by the marvellous Pushkin Press and they’ve never done me wrong so far 😊 It turned out to be a nice book about nice people, gently humorous and engaging. It wasn’t overly sweet or sentimental, and I enjoyed it immensely. The right book at the right time.

Ruth and Alex Cohen are an older couple looking to sell their East Village apartment for a million dollars (I suspect the intervening fifteen years since publication have seen the relative price rocket even further). They can currently manage the five flights to their front door but they’re aware this is likely to change. Alex is an artist and Ruth a retired teacher; they live with their beloved dachshund Dorothy.

“Alex brought Dorothy home the day Ruth retired after three decades as a public school English teacher. Those first few nights tending to Dorothy’s mystifying needs and constant demands had reminded Ruth of a Victorian novel in which the husband acquires an orphan for his greying childless wife to raise.”

We follow their potential sale over a weekend where Dorothy is in the animal hospital. She is also advanced in years and she suddenly can’t move her back legs. We are privy to her thoughts as well as those of her humans.

The scenes where Alex and Ruth are managing a sick Dorothy were really moving. They weren’t over-the-top deliberately heartrending, but they were very affecting in portraying the deep upset when an animal is ill.

“Alex touches her sleeve: he’s found the source of the alarm, the metal buckle on Dorothy’s faux leopard collar. Ruth had bought the collar because she thought it gave Dorothy a risque, haughty look, an old dominatrix, say, whose specialty was biting. Ruth watches as Alex unclasps the buckle at the nape of Dorothy’s neck with an intimacy and caution, a husband removing his ill wife’s necklace.”

Over the weekend Ruth and Alex will have to deal with their ambivalence about the move – neither afraid of change, but unsure if this is a change they really want to push for:

“He’s been covering these walls with his imagery for almost half a century, as methodically as a clam secretes its essence to make its shell. When Lily had first peered into his studio during the appraisal, she proclaimed it would make a perfect nursery.”

“She can almost see the spines of her library arranged alphabetically, floor to ceiling. Finding a home for her books is no less important to Ruth than finding a museum for his paintings is to Alex.”

There is humour alongside these more melancholy aspects, making the novel seem very real. Lily the realtor and the various people who attend their open house provide some respite from their worries about Dorothy. In the background there is also the unease of a possible terrorist at large in the city, which Alex and Ruth are concerned will affect their apartment price. They also struggle with pushing buyers for more money. Neither of these considerations endear them to themselves.

They are deeply principled people, monitored during the McCarthy era, and their struggles with these materialist considerations lightens their characterisation and stops them seeming priggish.

“His wife – whose ethics has been his bedrock and his muse and his shackles, who wouldn’t lie about her beliefs to the house Un-American Activities Committee even when it cost them friends, passports, his first retrospective, almost her beloved teaching job”

I thought Ciment beautifully evoked the love between these two people in old age too. They have been together forever and they still like one another. Ruth compensates for Alex’s poor hearing, he compensates for her poor eyesight.

“He has loved her for so long that he can no longer distinguish between passion and familiarity. He slips off her glasses, puts away her book, douses the light, and returns to the living room.”

Heroic Measures is also about the love of a city, and New York is portrayed as fondly as the human and animal characters. A lovely read throughout.

To end, Heroic Measures was adapted as Five Flights Up in 2015. It looks a faithful adaptation, although the location of the apartment and Dorothy’s breed has changed. I guess EB White is right about dachshunds’ temperament and the filmmakers needed a more amenable doggy actor:

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.” (JM Barrie)

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Continuing my endeavour to try and get some momentum back in my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge, today I’m off to Uruguay, with Mario Benedetti’s The Truce: The Diary of Martín Santomé (1960, transl. Harry Morales 2015) which I was alerted to by Fiction Fan’s glowing review at the start of the year.

As the title suggests, the novella is in diary form, as Martín records his days in the run-up to his retirement, reflecting on how to live out his days. He is a quiet man in an administrative job; things are predictable.

“Today was a happy day; just routine.”

He is a widow of twenty years, and although he still has an eye for women (particularly their legs) he hasn’t had another relationship:

“The entire machinery of my emotions came to a halt twenty years ago when Isabel died. First there was pain, then indifference, then, much later, freedom, and then, finally, tedium. Long, lonely, constant tedium.”

His children Esteban, Jaime and Blanca are essentially unknown to him:

“At least Blanca and I have something in common: she, too, is a sad person with a calling for happiness.”

But although Martín is recording a lot of sadness, it’s not overly depressing. He has an acceptance of his life, and he makes quietly humorous observations, such as an old acquaintance learning of Isabel’s death:

“There is a sort of automatic reflex which makes one talk about death and then immediately look at one’s watch.”

Or his grief when his mother died:

“Only a fervent hatred of God, relatives and fellow man sustained me during that period.”

But things are about to change for Martín in ways he didn’t expect, when he falls in love with Laura Avellaneda, a work colleague half his age. While this would naturally raise questions about power dynamics and appropriateness, I felt it worked in The Truce, as Martín has been established as a gentle man, uninterested in wielding any sort of power or manipulation, and he is very respectful of Laura:

“I’m not going to demand anything. If you, now or tomorrow or whenever, tell me to stop, we won’t discuss the matter anymore and we’ll remain friends.”

In this short novel Benedetti perfectly evokes the gentle, slowly evolving love of Martín and Laura, and of Martín’s grief and acceptance of all he has lost in life alongside all that he still has. It suggests hope is still a realistic thing to hold onto, at any time.

The Truce isn’t sentimental, and although it depicts a romance it’s not rose-tinted. There is one point in particular where Martín behaves badly. He is not a perfect human-being and he causes hurt as well as joy to people.

But it is an empathetic tale, warmly clear-sighted towards ordinary people and all the foibles, weaknesses and strengths that we all carry.

The Truce is realistic, in a way that suggests even the most painful experiences can still be worthwhile. It explores how to not let pain overwhelm, and the importance of compassion for others and for the self:

“They suffer from the most horrible variant of solitude: the solitude of someone who doesn’t even have himself.“

This was my first experience of Benedetti and I’d be interested to read more by him. Apparently he wrote over ninety books so there’s plenty for me to choose from!

Murder Under the Midnight Sun – Stella Blómkvist (transl. Quentin Bates) Blog Tour

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Today I’m taking part in a blog tour for Corylus Books, a lovely indie publisher with a focus on translated crime fiction. Back in September last year I took part in a blog tour for Murder at the Residence by Stella Blómkvist so I was looking forward to reacquainting myself with the tenacious lawyer in Murder Under the Midnight Sun. This novel was published in Iceland in 2015 and translated by Quentin Bates in 2023. The identity of the author remains a mystery…

Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“What does a woman do when her husband’s charged with the frenzied killing of her father and her best friend? She calls in Stella Blómkvist to investigate – however unwelcome the truth could turn out to be.

Smart, ruthless and with a flexible moral code all of her own, Stella Blómkvist is also dealing with a desperate deathbed request to track down a young woman who vanished a decade ago.

It looks like a dead end, but she agrees to pick up the stone-cold trail – and she never gives up, even if the police did a long time ago.

Then there’s the mystery behind the arm that emerges from an ice cap, with a mysterious ruby ring on one frozen finger? How does this connect to another unexplained disappearance, and why were the police at the time so keen to write it off as a tragic accident?”

As the blurb demonstrates, and as with Murder at the Residence, Stella finds herself with several plates to spin. Murder Under the Midnight Sun packs a lot into just 214 pages without ever seeming relentless or overwhelming. It’s expertly paced.

The Icelandic setting plays a part in the police’s indifference to the historic disappearance of a young British holidaymaker.

“People have vanished in Iceland before and never been found, without any indication of foul play.”

[…]

She’s far from the only missing person that Iceland’s natural world hasn’t given back.”

If anything, this serves to heighten Stella’s determination as she’s more than happy to butt up against the police, often with the help of her friend, the news blogger Máki. It’s through Máki that Stella finds herself increasingly caught up in Cold War intrigues that want to stay buried, and early on there’s a stunning set piece whereby Stella nearly ends up buried herself, down an icy crevasse.

The past and present are woven together seamlessly and the smaller population of Iceland make the connections between characters seem less contrived than they could in a more populous setting. The modern day murder of Stella’s friend Rannveig’s father and best friend was just convoluted enough to keep me guessing while being resolved satisfactorily in a short novel.

My one reservation – which I didn’t have with the previous novel – was Stella’s conduct in her private life. I’ve absolutely no issue with her being a woman who goes after what she wants. But when what she wants is a woman in a highly vulnerable state, and when her method of getting that woman is to ply her with strong alcohol, I’m not alongside. I don’t have to like everything about a protagonist to enjoy a novel and I did really enjoy Murder Under the Midnight Sun. If Stella can just be more respectful of informed sexual consent in future, that would make my enjoyment unreserved.

That aside, I did like Stella’s relentless pursuit of answers and her humorous self-belief:

“My cousin Sissi gazes at me with frank admiration in his eyes.

‘You’re one of a kind,’ he says.

I smile demurely. I agree entirely with his sentiment.”

Fingers crossed for more Stella translations!

Here are the stops from the rest of the tour, so do check out how other bloggers got on with Murder Under the Midnight Sun:

“It takes a village to raise a child.” (Proverb)

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Well, as I predicted a significant part of my May was grim, but at least it was short-lived. So while I couldn’t commit to my novella a day in May project this year, I have managed to read a few novellas which I’m hoping to blog on before the end of the month. Here’s hoping June is a massive improvement!

When I undertook the Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge, I wanted each book to be by an author from that country, not only set there. So the challenge has slowed as I try and locate appropriate translated fiction. Bright by Duanwad Pimwana (2002 transl. Mui Poopoksakul 2019) was apparently the first novel by a Thai woman to be translated into English. A volume of her short stories has also been translated, under the title Arid Dreams.

Bright almost reads like a series of short stories, except that the characters and setting are carried across the vignettes. It begins with a five-year-old boy, Kampol, being abandoned by his father who is taking his little brother Jon to live with his grandmother after their mother has left. But Bright isn’t unremittingly grim or a trip into poverty porn. The community of Mrs Tongan’s tenements rally round Kampol with varying degrees of willingness to ensure the boy is cared for.

“Kampol watched his father walk off until he disappeared. The flavour of the palo stew had grown distant, and the scent of detergent faint. He opened his hand: the blue action figure glinted in the dim light.”

We meet the various residents through Kampol’s eyes and we follow the events of the community alongside him. He plays with his best friend Oan, and is often cared for often by Oan’s hardworking mother Mon. But Pimwana never lets us forget that Kampol is carrying a lot of pain, just below the surface.

“He had found the best hiding place: you’d have to travel back in time to discover it. He skipped away joyfully. But then his melancholy caught up to him and his steps grew slow and measured – he didn’t know where to go.”

My heart sank when mobile caterer Dang offers Kampol a way to earn money if he keeps it quiet – but Dang only wants Kampol to walk on his back to relieve his aching muscles. Kampol also earns money running errands for soft-hearted Chong, the shopkeeper who finds it hard to refuse people credit. Bookish Chong was my favourite character, a man trying to convince the local kids of the joy of the printed word, without much success apart from Kampol.

“Chong was mournful as he watched the tree-cutting operation. The workers sawed off one section at a time, starting from the crown and working their way down. The pines disappeared, one top at a time, one tree at a time. Kampol stood next to Chong staring upward until the sky was empty. The notion of his mother, too, grew empty in his mind.”

The simple writing style worked really well in keeping the reader alongside Kampol while not claiming to be completely a child’s point of view. I found it direct and compelling in portraying a life with both hardships and joys in it.

Pimwana portrays a Thailand away from the tourist hotspots or glamourous settings. In doing so, she never patronises her characters or preaches of a life of either degrading poverty or sentimental saintly striving. The personalities in her pages are entirely believable, human and humane. It’s a fine balance that she achieves with the lightest touch. A hugely impressive and highly readable novella.

“He had felt lonesome before, many times in fact. But in those moments, even if he didn’t have anyone in the world, he had his familiar neighbourhood, with its familiar crevices and corners that he knew so well, which provided comfort. There was the wall outside Chong’s shop, where the jasmine bush stood, marked with dirt from where he leaned against it when he visited. Or there was the wedged fork of the poinciana. Or behind Mrs Tongjan’s house, his hideout beneath the shrub whose leafy branches bowed down and kissed the ground. When desolation struck, Kampol had these familiar nooks to embrace him.”

“Apparent simplicity of outlook is always suspicious.” (Anthony Powell)

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This is the fifth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The fifth volume, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, was published in 1960 and begins by considering a bombed-out pub from World War Two, which triggers memories of the past and events of the 1920s and 1930s. It expands on relationships from the previous novels and portrays various marriages.

This shifting back and forth through time means characters who have died are resurrected, and minor ones expanded upon. Although perhaps they would rather not be, finding themselves the subject of Powell’s razor-sharp observations:

“The sight of Mr Deacon always made me think of the Middle Ages because of his resemblance to a pilgrim, a mildly sinister pilgrim, with more than a streak of madness in him, but then in every epoch a proportion of pilgrims must have been sinister, some mad as well.”

“[St John Clarke’s] name was rarely seen except in alphabetical order among a score of nonentities signing the foot of some letter to the press.”

The gathering alongside Mr Deacon at the pub leads to two of the main characters in this volume: Moreland the composer whom Nick befriends, and his acquaintance, the really quite disturbing music critic Maclintick.

“Under his splenetic exterior Maclintick harboured all kind of violent, imperfectly integrated sentiments. Moreland, for example, impressed him, perhaps rightly, as a young man of matchless talent, ill equipped to face a materialistic world.”

Marriage is the major theme of this volume, and the scenes of Maclintick’s domestic life are truly horrible. Only marginally more disturbing are the descriptions of Nick’s schoolfriend Stringham battling with his alcoholism, and his childhood secretary Miss Weedon opportunistically using it to control him.

There are of course lighter sides to the tale too. Powell takes his satirical eye to relationships between the sexes, both in dating:

“Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.”

And later in marriage, as Moreland laments: “I shall be glad when this baby is born. Matilda has not been at all easy to deal with since it started. Of course, I know that is in the best possible tradition.”

Powell doesn’t dwell on Nick’s marriage to Isobel in great detail, but in the brief glimpses we have they seem happy together, despite sadnesses to contend with. Nick also seems to enjoy his extended, eccentric in-laws. Erridge has gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War, without success:

“His time in Spain seems to have been a total flop. He didn’t get up to the front and he never met Hemingway.”

There’s also Nick’s description of his mother-in-law Lady Warminster, more affectionate than biting: “She looked as usual like a very patrician Sibyl about to announce a calamitous disaster of which she had personally given due and disregarded warning.”

By far my favourite scene was at Lady Warminster’s party, where the reader gets to know St John Clarke further, his having made only brief appearances in previous volumes:

“He came hurriedly into the room, a hand held out in front of him as if to grasp the handle of a railway carriage door before the already moving train gathered speed and left the platform.

‘Lady Warminster, I am indeed ashamed of myself,’ he said in a high, rich, breathless, mincing voice, like that of an experienced actor trying to get the best out of a minor part in Restoration comedy. ‘I must crave the forgiveness of you and your guests.’

He gave a rapid glance round the room to discover whom he had been asked to meet, at the same time diffusing about him a considerable air of social discomfort.”

Nick’s touchstone of Widmerpool only makes brief appearances: “I should never have gone out of my way to seek him, knowing, as one does with certain people, that the rhythm of life would sooner or later be bound to bring us together again.” but he manages to seem an entirely menacing background presence regardless.

I’m enjoying A Dance to the Music of Time more and more. Powell’s satire is never bitter or leaves me feeling uncomfortable, as satire can sometimes do. He’s clear-sighted and affectionate without being sentimental. Returning to the sequence is starting to feel like catching up with your wisest, wittiest friend. An absolute delight.

“Marriage, partaking of such – and thousand more – dual antagonisms and participations, finally defies definition.”

To end, if either of The Proclaimers are married, then I hope they wore nicer suits at their actual weddings:

“Everything that mattered had happened already” (Natalia Ginzburg)

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Last year I read All Our Yesterdays, which was my first experience of Natalia Ginzburg’s writing, and I absolutely loved her unfussy, direct style. The Dry Heart (1947 transl. Frances Frenaye 1952) is a much shorter work at just 108 pages but it packs a real punch.

On the first page, the unnamed narrator is with her husband in their home:

“I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes. But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.”

And so this is a whydunit rather than a whodunit, as we are taken back to a time when a young, naïve girl marries a man who she knows does not love her:

“When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.”

Initially her husband Alberto is interested in her, but not romantically. He reads Rilke to her and listens to all she has to say. But he is in love with Giovanna and he never pretends otherwise. They marry despite ambivalence on both sides.

She has friends, including Francesca who lives more independently and freely; and Augusto who is her husband’s friend but also kind and genuine towards her.  Yet the narrator still seems very isolated, and lonely within her marriage. Alberto obfuscates and disregards her feelings. Who she is and how his behaviour impacts on her is of no consequence to him.  

“I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try and get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did.”

The simple, direct language lends itself to the length of the novella and also emphasises youth of narrator. The complexity of The Dry Heart lies in the characterisation and builds an intriguing portrait of a marriage.

Despite having undertaken such a violent act, the narrator doesn’t ask for sympathy, and doesn’t justify herself. She presents what happened without a trace of sentimentality or self-pity. Possibly she is detached and deeply traumatised, but as the reader comes to her at the point of the shooting, we don’t know if this voice is one of trauma or long-established.

By refusing to have the narrator engage in self-justification and avoiding any sense of authorial knowingness or psychological explanation, Ginzburg firmly places the why in the readers hands. It’s a masterstroke: she highlights patriarchal oppression, psychological warfare in marriage, the pitiable choices available for women and the danger of dismissing fellow human beings, without being remotely heavy-handed.    

The Dry Heart is hugely impressive and I’m looking forward to exploring Ginzburg further, thanks to the wonderful Daunt Books who are doing such a great job reissuing her work in translation.

“It’s probably a mistake to follow every meandering of our feelings and waste time listening to every echo from within. That, in fact, is no way to live.”

To end, from a dry heart to a cold one:

“Everybody is a teenage idol.” (Barry Gibb)

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Idol, Burning by Rin Usami (2020 transl. Asa Yoneda 2022) took me into a world I knew nothing about – that of having an oshi. It is a complex culture and there are lots of interesting articles online about it. For the sake of brevity in this post I’ll describe it as where fandom is taken to another level, with devotional idolatry of your oshi, with apologies for huge oversimplification.

At the start of the novel, sixteen-year-old Akari is waking up to her social media DMs going into overdrive: her oshi, Masaki Ueno, part of boy band Maza Maza, has punched a fan. We follow her through the subsequent days as she struggles with the fallout of his behaviour.

Akari struggles even when things were going well with her oshi. She not academic, she doesn’t like her part-time job but she needs it to pay for all the merchandise associated with her oshi. (Without hammering it home, Usami makes it really clear the financial demands of having an oshi, and how this is exploited by merchandisers.) Her father is away overseas and she’s aware she frustrates her mother and studious sister.

Akari’s mind troubles her with a lack of focus outside her oshi, and her body troubles her too:

“Just being alive took a toll. To talk to someone you had to move the flesh on your face. You bathe to get rid of the grime that built upon your skin and clicked your nails because they kept growing. I exhausted myself trying to achieve the bare minimum, but it had never been enough. My will and my body would always disengage before I got there.”

What helps is her oshi:

“When my eyes met his, they reminded me how to really see. I felt an enormous swell of pure energy, neither positive nor negative, come rising up from my very foundation, and suddenly remembered what it felt like to be alive.”

Akari lives a substantial amount of her life online. Following her oshi’s accounts; blogging about her oshi; chatting with others who share her obsession and understand.

“Narumi sounded the same in person as she did online. I looked at her face, the round eyes and concerned brows overflowing with tragedy, and thought, There’s an emoji like that.

[…] Her facial expressions changed like she was switching out profile pictures.”

What was really clever in this novella (115 pages) and its translation is how Usami changed Akari’s tone and language depending on the medium she was using. The reader could see clearly how the person she created online through her blog and social media interactions wasn’t entirely authentic. It wasn’t entirely inauthentic either, and some of her closest relationships are with those she speaks to online – who of course, may not be entirely authentic either.

“When I pictured a world without Masaki, I thought about saying goodbye to the people here, too. It was our oshi that brought us together, and without him, we’d all go our separate ways. Some people moved over into different genres like Narumi had, but I knew I could never find another oshi. Masaki would always be my one and only. He alone moved me, spoke to me, accepted me.”

It’s a lonely world and there are hints Akari has been diagnosed with depression.

Through her devotion to Masaki we see all that Akari can do: she can be focussed, she can be insightful and she can be sensitive. It’s just that nothing other than her oshi prompts these behaviours.

We never learn the truth of Masaki’s actions and I was pleased about this. It is not his story, and while demonstrating the fallout of a celebrity flaming, Usami keeps the focus tightly on Akari. There is a Q&A with the author at the back of the novel and I wasn’t surprised to read that she has an oshi herself, because her portrayal of Akari is never patronising or pitying.

What Idol, Burning explores is how we all have to find a way to live, and that when this is focussed on something external and unpredictable – like a person and their constructed celebrity persona – then you can be in an incredibly vulnerable position. The novella ends on a tentatively positive note and I hoped Akari would learn to be the protagonist of her own life, rather than giving that power over so completely to someone else.

To end, I should definitely choose some J-pop, but I know absolutely nothing about it. So it’s back to 80s cheese, which I do know about 😀 Idol by name, Idol by nature…

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” (e. e. cummings)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

The blurb on the cover of my edition of Grown Ups by Marie Aubert (2019 transl. Rosie Hedger 2021) pushes it as ‘the perfect summer read’ and ‘pure escapism’ with which I couldn’t disagree more. Obviously we all have different reactions to books, but for me a novella (154 pages) about a woman coming to terms with her rapidly reducing choices regarding fertility, while at the summer house of her family with all its inherent tensions and rivalries, didn’t feel remotely escapist. Even when it’s darkly humorous and set in a log cabin in Norway 😉

Grown Ups features a very unlikable protagonist in Ida. She behaves really badly by anyone’s standards. But she was also recognisable and (somewhat) sympathetic.

At the start of the novel she is at a Swedish clinic having her eggs frozen:

“One day, I thought as I lay there in the gynaecology chair, one day things have to work out, one day, after a long line of married and otherwise committed and uninterested and uninteresting men, things have to work out, just lying there made me believe both men and child might materialise, just the fact that I was there and actually doing it was a promise that there was more to come, one day.”

I really felt for Ida. As the quote shows, she is feeling a bit desperate regarding the future as she turns forty, but pinning her hopes on a fantasy. As the story develops, the ambivalence she feels about what that future might look like is subtly portrayed. She doesn’t really seem to like children very much, but she doesn’t want that choice taken away from her. If she truly wants a committed relationship, why does she keep seeking out men who are already committed to someone else?

She travels to the family summerhouse in Norway for her mother’s birthday. Her sister Marthe is there with her husband Kristoffer and step-daughter Olea. The sisters relationship is full of long-held petty tensions, but it felt like they could actually be really close if they would just step outside of these entrenched behaviours. It doesn’t help that Marthe has redecorated the cabin without asking or even discussing it with Ida. She is also pregnant.

“‘I’m not as tough as you are,’ Marthe says, sounding a little sarcastic. It’s always the same, every summer, I’m quick to get into the water while Marthe takes her time, and then we each make digs about which approach is best.”

One of the hardest things to read in the book is Ida’s treatment of Olea. Recognising that Olea and Marthe don’t get on, Ida manipulates the child to increase her opposition to Marthe, just to prove something to Marthe and herself. She seems to have no fondness for Olea, and everything is performative rather than felt or understood.

“I’m the grown up now, I’m good at this. My tone is calm and kind, it feels familiar, like how things ought to be […] See, Marthe, I can do this, I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing this.”

Ida is destructive in her behaviour but only half-recognises this. I felt with Olea she didn’t really see the child as a person so didn’t fully recognise what she was doing. Flirting with Kristoffer on the other hand, she is fully aware of…

I’m making Ida sound more unlikable than she is and not doing justice to Aubert’s subtlety at all! The hurt Ida is experiencing is so clear, she is just seeking entirely flawed ways of managing that pain. Although she mentions friends, they are not named and she comes across as very isolated, particularly when her mother arrives with partner Stein.

“I feel the injustice, rampant and raging, there’s no one there to console me”

There’s also a passage where Ida describes dating and her hopes for more, where my heart just broke for her. It was filled with so much anger and loathing towards herself.

I looked on goodreads and yep, some readers really hated Ida 😀 But for me, while a lot of her behaviour was downright awful, I thought she was realistically portrayed as someone who has grown up thinking love is conditional and now doesn’t know who she is or what she really wants.

Grown Ups is well paced and things aren’t all tied up neatly at the end, which I liked as it didn’t undermine Ida’s situation or her feelings. I did have a sense Ida would carry on but maybe do a bit better. Unlike at the start of the story, there was hope for her grounded in something real.

To end, two sisters who seem to get on better than Ida and Marthe, singing about the struggles of trying to be grown up and a problem Ida has definitely experienced: