Category: Book review
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The consolation of animals: Téa Obreht’s ‘Inland’
Téa Obreht’s Inland is extraordinary in its prosaic intensity, one of the many reasons it has been shortlisted for this year’s International Dylan Thomas Prize. The story depicts the lives of Nora on a farm during a drought in the Arizona territory in 1893, and the frontiersman Lurie as he arrives in Texas from eastern…
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Writing (a) genealogy: ‘Surge’ by Jay Bernard
In ‘Kombucha’, a prose poem about, among other things, menstrual mooncups, Jay Bernard’s persona asks: When I stare at these bottles, it’s blood that has been three times enlarged. Who says we have no genealogy? Who says that if I line them up, as ornaments, a blood archive, then it isn’t like us having had…
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‘Lot’ by Bryan Washington: a battle for an ordinary
Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic Books: 2019) is a short-story collection depicting the lives of several Houston citizens. One character’s story recurrently comes in and out of focus throughout Lot, but otherwise the stories transition between characters—mostly men—and explores how they experience the city. Another key element of the collection is its focus on who we’d…
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A stretched tapestry: Bernardino Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’
Twelve overlapping stories across over 450 pages. A novel ‘bursting at the seams’ (Guardian). A book without a single full-stop. Bernardino Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other invites scrutiny about its structure and how it stitches together the twelve narrative patches of the quilt. Or is it: … how it constructs the twelve-piece mosaic? I think…
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Derry in absentia: Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘Midwinter Break’
I toyed with the title of this blog. It could easily have been titled ‘Love in Amsterdam’, because the novel is mostly about a third-age love story between husband Gerry and wife Stella who go on holiday to Amsterdam. But Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break (Jonathan Cape, 2017) is shadowed by a hazy story of tragedy…
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Not quite everything: ‘Fatherhood’ by Caleb Klaces
The question of form may never be resolved. Is the novel better than poetry? Are short stories just novel-lite? In Fatherhood (Prototype, 2019), Caleb Klaces avoids that scrutiny completely by mixing two of those forms together. Fatherhood combines ‘prose and poetry in an experimental work of verse fiction’. The text tells the story of Caleb…