Marta by Eliza Orzeszkowa, tr. Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn & Stephanie Kraft

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A short feminist novel set in 1870s Warsaw, published in English translation by Ohio University Press for the first time in 2018. Marta is a young upper-middle class woman whose husband has just died, leaving her almost no money. She discovers that her perfunctory education in ladies' accomplishments has not equipped her for the limited range of jobs available to women - while working-class women of her age already have years of experience under their belts - and she struggles with increasing desperation to support herself and her small daughter.

Eliza Orzeszkowa is most famous in Poland for On the Niemen (1888), a longer, rural, novel which is on the school curriculum. (It has so far only had a self-published translation to English.) So far as I can tell, Marta is the first new professionally-published English translation of any Orzeszkowa work for decades, which is quite exciting if you want to read Polish classics in English. (There was previously The Forsaken (1980?) and The Argonauts (1901).)

Marta has been variously described as melodrama, as social realism and as naturalistic. Eliza Orzeszkowa was part of the Polish Positivist cultural movement, of realist writing influenced by Dickens, Balzac and Zola, of watchful stoicism about Poland's occupied status, and, as was was popular in much of 19th century Europe, middle-class advocacy for hard work and social and technological progress. The Positivist outlook was also a pragmatic way of staying safe whilst maintaining a public voice, especially under the more repressive Tsarist regime that ruled Warsaw and the rural area where Orzeszkowa lived for most of her adult life. (Somewhat greater latitude was possible in the Austro-Hungarian zone in the south.) As Prof. Grażyna J. Kozaczka explains in the introduction to Marta,
"The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society."

Marta is based on a "there but for the grace of god go I" scenario. Some years earlier, Orzeszkowa had taken the unusual step of divorcing her husband, and her opportunities were also limited by the ruling Russian regime's restrictions on Poles who, like her, had supported the 1863 uprising. But due to her considerable language skills, she was able to support herself with translation, writing and publishing work. She was aware that similar financial independence was not possible for most of her female peers.

In the years immediately after it was written, Marta had a significant impact in Polish and other Continental European languages. The protagonist's situation was commoner in Poland than in some other countries due to "the loss of estates due to punitive confiscation or poor management in the changing economy", as Kozaczka explains in the introduction; and that it was soon translated into, among others, "Russian, German, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, and even Esperanto". Borkowska says that it "became the bible of German feminist movements".

This pan-European impact was probably enhanced because, as Kozaczka notes, the Polish setting is not strongly emphasised. Locations are mentioned, but the novel's subject is the unprepared woman struggling to stay afloat not in Warsaw in particular, but in the city in general, which "takes on a menacing quality" now she is unprotected by her husband: the late-19th century city a-bustle in the process of industrialising and commercialising.

"the great city assumed the form of a huge hive in which a multitude of human beings moved, surging with life and joining in a race. Each one had his own place for work and for rest, his own goals to reach, and his own tools to forge a way through the crowd."

"Here, as everywhere else, the degree of a worker’s well-being is in direct relation to the excellence of what he produces." [Whilst these days, at the level of work Marta is trying to obtain, consistency, presenteeism and promptness are probably more important provided there is basic competence.]

A handful of features pop out as locally distinctive. There are some attitudes and thoughts more Catholic than Protestant, although none which changes the story. The most noticeable was the preference, even in shops selling goods of feminine interest such as haberdashery, for dapper male staff - who were considered good for business because they were attractive to wealthy female customers; this is also a major feature of The Doll by Bolesław Prus (1890), the greatest Positivist classic. (These men were expected to flirt, but not *too* much.) It contrasts with the popular figure of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century shopgirl in Britain, and Zola's The Ladies' Paradise.

As someone from a professional middle-class background whose capacity for work and earning is, for health reasons, not what I once thought it would be, I expected I would feel a connection and sympathy with Marta, regardless of the story's overt didacticism and its fairly basic style of writing. I also anticipated it would be interesting as a historical document.

In a translation where one is reading both the author and the translators for the first time, and the translators are also quite new to book-length fiction, it's not easy to be sure how much of the style reflects the original. However, the small amount of commentary I've been able access in English suggests that the flaws were in Orzeszkowa's writing. "Her first works are not very well-written and may only be of interest as testimony to the author's sympathy for the trends of modernization,", says Grażyna Borkowska in Ten Centuries of Polish Literature (2004) (p. 182). Czesław Miłosz, in his History of Polish Literature (1969, rev.1983) implies that although novels were her most famous output, they were not, perhaps, her forte: "their technique is old-fashioned and perhaps not up to the level of the exceptional mind which she revealed in her correspondence with the most eminent intellectuals of Poland and Europe" (p.303). She recognised this herself, saying in one letter, "If I was born with a creative faculty, it was a mediocre one. That spark was a little enlivened by considerable intellectual capabilities, and great emotional capabilities, perhaps too much for one heart." (p.314).
Whatever one thinks of Orzeszkowa's writing, she had an interesting life and mind: perhaps a biography would be more interesting than some of her novels, and she may have been better-suited to non-fiction writing. But novels were where the opportunities lay in her day. Between the lines of Miłosz's (and others) descriptions of her, I'm seeing an intellectual writing "accessible" fiction to earn money to live off, and because it got her message across:
"the most open to new intellectual trends, and until her death in 1910 she reacted with understanding to currents which seemed to the Positivists just madness" (p.304)
"her abundant literary production could be qualified as 'populist' although the term has not been used in Polish criticism" (pp.304-305).

The simple style made it readable on occasions when I might have been too tired for more complex writing, and - though it's much long since I read Frances Hodgson Burnett to be wholly confident of similarities - I often thought of A Little Princess when I started reading Marta, not least during the scenes in her new, spartan accommodation. Although unlike a children's book, one shouldn't necessarily expect a happy ending. I always felt that likelihood that made it better and more honest. This feeling was captured by some lines in an article about burnout that went viral the weekend just before I finished writing this post: "In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive." Yes, that kind of stuff gets annoying and obscures real problems. I found myself preferring this 19th century story to many contemporary ones, because it seems truer to those who fall through safety-nets, whilst so much recent material still assumes a greater level of security than actually exists now for plenty of people, as compared with 10-20 years ago.

This was one of those novels in which the author seems to be warming up, as the writing becomes more gripping further into the story. Its trajectory follows Marta through increased levels of need, from early stages which will probably be most recognisable to other people originally from comfortable backgrounds, such as trying to refuse wages from a kind employer for work of a low standard, although she had put a lot of time into it and needs the money. It is about the process by which such principles are whittled away as she becomes better acquainted with real need and what it entails. She learns to work backbreakingly hard for a while and survive on a couple of hours' sleep a night for weeks doing two jobs. But because her skills are few, and training opportunities non-existent, there is further to fall.

As the novel's crescendo built towards the end, I found a description of a state of mind I hadn't seen written about so recognisably before - it was possibly the character's background as well as the timing. Of moments of discovering the operation of a clawing, reflex-level, almost spasmodic desperation for the means of further survival - who knew little bits of money could matter that much, not that they looked like little bits any more - in which former care about manners and propriety is sunk and unfelt; and how it feels depersonalised, dreamlike and surreal, for this is not an existence one ever expected - expectations still lodged in a subconscious quite untrained for these circumstances, built for a life in which requests would mostly be answered and sometimes not even necessary. I read much of Marta around the same time as Vernon Subutex 1 - very contemporary but also dealing with a formerly comfortable character's descent into destitution - and for a few days the two novels were a small chorus, showing a situation which is a social problem, but one not seen as so bad now, because these people have been more privileged in the past, and there will always be some decisions people will say they could have made differently (albeit more so in Vernon's case than Marta's).

Kozaczka makes a powerful argument which quotes Kelleter and Mayer from Melodrama!: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood: “the melodramatic mode has always lent itself to stories of power struggles and to enactments of socio-cultural processes of marginalization and stratification.” There are plenty of occasions when seeing real life in melodramatic terms can be positively disadvantageous on a personal level. But extrapolating from this cultural relationship between melodrama and inequality both prompted me to re-evaluate forms and tropes that have often been derided in more recent times - and to consider that rather than being antiquated, it may be a form and tendency *increasingly* suitable for arts in the contemporary landscape of growing inequality and political polarisation, manifest climate change and mass population movements - shaking up the background complacency remaining after the stability and optimism of recent decades in most Western countries. (The news has already become more melodramatic over the past two and a half years - illustrating some of the drawbacks of melodrama as a real-life format, full of, in Kozaczka's words about the form in general, "the unambiguously drawn conflict between good and evil set on the stage of a “modern metropolis”; the effusive expressions of feelings; and the presence of stock characters who may not have deep “psychological complexity,”¹⁹ such as wealthy villains and beleaguered heroines whose virtue is constantly tested—should not to be discounted altogether.")

Despite what I thought when starting Marta - and my reservations in recommending it for anything other than historical interest - the style and the melodrama doesn't seem to have been an obstacle to other recent English readers either: several, on GR and one in this blog post by a judge for the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award, have also found the book more involving and affecting than expected - so there seems to be something about it; maybe it's not just me.

(Read Oct-Nov 2018; reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.

Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, tr. Frank Wynne

Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2018 - but a novel I wanted to read regardless, as I'd been excited about it since I first caught sight of it in early 2017 as an upcoming translated title.

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While I was in the middle of Vernon Subutex One, a book called Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel appeared in my Goodreads feed. (Thanks Kris.) Vernon Subutex has a strong claim to that subtitle too. In English it's so far been pigeonholed as translated literary fiction about the state of modern life / Western Europe / France / Paris (depending how specific you think its types are), and its Booker International shortlisting cements this - but just as much as being a perceptive take on contemporary society and politics, it faces up to the mythology and glitter of rock and indie as things that belong to the past and the middle-aged, that mass youth culture now has other foci, and many 20th century rock legends and their hangers-on are dead, or suited and booted with sensible jobs and nuclear families, or Peter Pans (of various genders) with levels of financial security ranging from the pampered, to the destitute like the titular former record-shop owner. So Vernon Subutex is also a book / series for people who love reading about the faded glamour of music scenes, and who don't follow translation prizes. It is so much on point about the pop-culture of different age groups that I still can't believe it was first published in 2015 and hadn't just been written a few months ago, as voters tired of - the obviously unmentioned - Macron, from the politics to the fashion (my note says about one female character's wardrobe "man-repeller Cos type clothing as favoured on Mumsnet" although I didn't record the page number that would have helped in quoting Despentes' own description). It would probably also be of interest to those who've enjoyed British topical political novels like Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion, as a similar bulletin from across the Channel.

It's a cartoonish, slangy satire in a 1990s style, but its caricatures are sharper, its characterisation deeper and the observations more true than in 90% of that stuff. I felt as if Despentes had lived as most of these people (and met the rest). It somehow romanticises less than most music books, whilst still being as cool as the best of them. (The blurb's cheesy wording doesn't reflect the understanding of subcultures inside the book, nor is it even wholly accurate about the plot.) It may be told via multiple characters, like a lot of 2010s literary fiction, but it's in close third-person rather than first, and the present-day story progresses chronologically. As long as you can deal with a lot of characters having equal importance, it's more straightforwardly readable and less experimental than might be expected from its current positioning in English. It didn't feel like anything that would be on one of those longlists. It was a bunking-off, guilty-pleasure kind of book I might read instead of anything I *should*. Except the writing, especially the inner life of most characters, is way too good and too convincing for any so-called guilt to come into it. People are just atypical enough to be convincing, for instance, Vernon weirdly finds coke relaxing.

There were a handful of things that perhaps could have been handled better - although as this is only part one of a trilogy, there's plenty of scope for further developments in later books. Recently-deceased rock star Alex Bleach - videos of whom are the novel's mcguffin - was black, yet there's nothing about him as a black artist, or how his stage name, and his cultural positioning identical to that of a white rock star relate to that (the name must be a comment in itself), and his social circle doesn't seem to include any other black people - his friends who appear in the book seem to be mostly white, with a few middle-eastern /Muslim. The novel's observation of political change references the growing acceptability of the far right, especially among the young, for instance, a biography of Bleach is probably "too middle-class hipster for the baby fascists of her generation". I'm not sure whether it's meant to be a close reflection of contemporary Paris or about a slightly different fictional version, just a little more dystopian from the reality where you can still find a homeless person sleeping in your app-hired electric car - but if it's the former, it doesn't have anything about a similar growth in socialist and far-left politics. The character I found least convincing was Patrice, a recently-separated domestic violence perpetrator who puts up the sofa-surfing Vernon for a while. It's possible I'm relying too much on stuff from psychology textbooks in this, but I also haven't knowingly met anyone who contradicts the idea that the high level of self-awareness and honesty, and lack of grandiosity, displayed by Patrice wouldn't co-exist long-term alongside his severely abusive behaviour, because if he were really that aware - and he's not written like someone kidding himself - he would have been able to reform himself more. He would have worked better written in distant third-person, with some of the insights into his behaviour coming from an omniscient narrator rather than from his own thoughts.

I occasionally had doubts about the 5-star rating; it started out as a book I wished I could have written, then at times it was too much, too much like eating some once-favourite treat I didn't now love as much as I used to, and for a while I only read 50 pages every few days. But towards the end, I was impressed with almost everything from the depiction of Vernon's decay (the specifics of which has unfortunately become blended in my memory with the later stages of the fall from prosperity of the title character in 19th-century Polish novel Marta, which I finished a few days later) to the aptness of references such as crap right-wing scriptwriter Xavier's interest in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle - whose politics were similar to those of Subutex's far-right characters and whose most famous work The Fire Within is somewhat echoed in the wanderings and descent of Vernon.

The French original of Vernon Subutex is packed with Parisian slang which was essentially untranslatable to English, as mentioned in this interview with translator Frank Wynne. Something has, in a way, been lost in translation, but, whilst never overegging it, Wynne has produced an English version in a register recognisable and credible, alongside all the reference-dropping (like the character who stole CDs using the method she saw in Christiane F) to anyone who used to read the British music press while it was still decent, and who remembers the work of punkish younger novelists of the 1990s - and as the focal characters are now in their 40s and 50s, Vernon reckons that if someone still listens to Tricky that probably means they're okay, this is a great fit for their heyday, people like the former rock girlfriend who reckons that if the menopause is as tough as they say, she might go back on hard drugs. The novel's interest in understanding all sides, humanising all characters equally, whether they are homeless or far right or trans or devoutly muslim or an ex-porn star or a comfortable middle-class straight couple with kids, is also perhaps more characteristic of this generation's attitudes than of Millenials and Gen Z, of people formed by a different time, when the tail-end of the post-war consensus, and post-modernism, was the order of the day. The trilogy has been compared by its French fans to the work of Zola and Balzac - two writers I've still not read; in the last few months, I've been finding this to be a major gap due to their influence on the classic Polish literature I've been reading - and now on Vernon Subutex.

I would love to see a review of Subutex by Nick Lezard, quondam book critic and writer of columns on middle-aged, middle-class poverty and near-homelessness in the New Statesman - although maybe he'd find it uncomfortably close to the bone, as Vernon's inertia, probably masking low-grade depression, is similar. From the poignant and ruthless years of attrition of a record collection once thought a permanent part of one's identity, as it's listed for eBay sale to buy basic consumables like food, to the weird gulf between who you know and the state of your own life, and the sort of welfare-state fails that left-leaning Brits like to think still don't happen on the Continent, and material artefacts of the rise and fall of personal circumstances like "the goose-down quilt he'd been lugging around since he was 30", Despentes is doing her absolute damndest to get it through to comfortable liberal readers that this stuff isn't nearly as far away from them as they'd like to think: even if you haven't started falling through the safety net, it probably is happening to someone of your acquaintance, and even to people you once admired.

And unlike so many commentators of this age, writing about and for their peers, there's also respect not dismissiveness, just as much for anyone else in the fast-moving cynical entertainment world of this book, for the younger generation on its own terms, here via a venial film director: his own daughter got it into her head to be a "YouTube Beauty Vlogger"… to his shock he discovered a universe of young girls who know exactly how to pose for a camera, how to frame a shot, and how to upload "make-up tutorials" that get up to 56 million hits when filmed in their bedrooms. He realised he was missing a trick, that he needed someone in his office to scour the web for new trends. This is typical of the way a lot is packed in: two characters' perspectives are elucidated simultaneously, whilst saying something kind of soundbitey about the present and moving the story forward. The buzz of every minute of being a twentysomething in the capital who knows quite a few of the right people, while trying to meet more, is vividly alive in the story of up and coming music writer Lydia Bazooka and it made memories of 00s East London flash before my eyes.

I've never read Despentes before (or especially wanted to before I first heard about Vernon Subutex) but vaguely knew of her by repute since Baise-Moi. As a result of enjoying VS1, have looked at a few interviews and other books of hers. Wynne described her as "ornery" and she seems even more so now that her non-fiction writings don't fit with the prevailing trends in late-2010s feminism, especially among younger women who are reacting against the prevalence of online porn (concern about internet porn is referenced here by an ex-porn-star character's idly daft book idea) - and her apparent advocacy of political lesbianism in one interview seemed to puzzle a young journalist. (Apologies if I misinterpreted this reporter.) Her most consciously transgressive move in this book is possibly an FTM character who transitions for somewhat non-standard reasons. Vernon Subutex himself may be a straight man, and the book's characters of various sexualities and genders, so it's not lesbian-focused like some of her earlier work, but there are a number of countercultural lesbian characters, one of whom also appears in Apocalypse Bébé. The sexuality of the formidable homeless Olga is unstated, but she reminded me of a more realist version of the Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.

About a month ago in the Times, an article by Laura Freeman asked Is there a great Brexit novel?. My impression is that most literary 'Brexit novels' already published are going for easy wins with a Remainer audience, and are therefore low on social and political complexity. Freeman described something along the lines of what I hoped to read - but which will evidently take longer than two and a half years to emerge, perhaps much longer:
How would Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gissing and Orwell have dealt with Project Fear, enemies of the people, the end of experts and the modern Circumlocution Office that is the Department for Exiting the European Union? ... There is something distasteful about that Welsh novelist — a personification of smuggery — in Cusk’s Kudos, repeating the old canard about prospectless leavers being “turkeys voting for Christmas”. A Dickens or an Orwell would ask: “Why vote leave? Why remain?” Today’s novelist howls: “Why, why, why?”

Despentes is not responding to a single political earthquake as are Brits writing about Brexit, or Americans about the Trump presidency, but to shifting trends. She gives considerably more space to one side of aggressively polarised politics than the other (the side on which her audience is less likely to be found, I assume) - but she comes closer to presenting an equivalent panorama of views and characters than anything of which I'm currently aware in English, other than perhaps Byers.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to the next instalment (its character list has already been useful while reading part one) and hope it maintains the momentum and quality of the first. In presenting (Even if reading over this post, as with many of my other 5-star reviews, makes me wonder if liking a book this much results in a fannish babble unlikely to convince others, because some works you simply *get* beyond anything that can be justified with quotes - or you don't.)

(read Nov 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

A book I've been circling for years, even before I joined Goodreads: depending what I heard about it, sometimes it sounded enticing and light (a charming, funny, Alice-like fantasy with intellectual depth) sometimes depressing (about an old lady in an oppressive nursing home). I was finally induced to read it by this recent interview with Olga Tokarczuk, in which she says it influenced her newly-translated Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.

Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.

In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.

The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)

There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.

The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.

I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.

(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

The first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Sabrina reminds me a lot of The Killing. Forbrydelsen, that is, the Danish original. I've never seen the American adaptation, and never previously wished I had. Like the first series of Forbrydelsen, Sabrina examines in deep detail the effects of one young woman's murder on those around her, rippling out to those a degree or two removed, and then into the media and the political landscape. But it's very American: resolutely unglamorous, uncool middle-American, where nearly everyone is slightly overweight and not noticeably fashionable - maybe wearing Walmart clothes - lives in featureless modern housing and works in equally blank, soulless offices. Life lived to the sound of aircon hum under polystyrene-panelled ceilings and clicks on clickbait, a state-of-part-of-the nation novel. There are slankets and vertical blinds. His wife left after “she said I was detached and oblivious”. It’s a reflection and image of white middle-America in the late 2010s, the way The Simpsons used to be in the 90s – grown anhedonic, wired, tired, crueller and more paranoid, turned inward.

So after that paean, why only 4 stars? WTF? I’m just not that keen on the art style. I’m fussy about that with graphic novels and comics, and with the 'big' subject matter and high production values, I'd have liked more detail and realism. On the plus side, though, the rounded, almost childlike friendliness of it conveys how comfortable parts of America are with mile upon mile of buildings that would depress many Europeans, with things like the place of the military in US society, and with shock-jocks – and the paucity of detail and shading communicates the flat bleakness of normality, and of existing - just being not fighting - through shitty circumstances. (Two big half-page detailed panels stood out: one of a kindergarten - a page in a children’s book a character opens - and one of an auto sales lot. Another page from the same children’s book produced a fascinating sense of uncanny-valley dislocation, showing a spot-the-difference that has 25 differences instead of the stated 20, and two panels of animals at a dancing lesson where a lion looms, with unspoken sense of threat, over a mouse who’s apparently meant to be an equal, and not prey.)

Drnaso is really good on other types of detail. It’s not often in books that characters talk about things like getting a second opinion from dentists, or a trivial entertainment news story, without it leading to or meaning anything else. This is real, mundane existence trundling on, while not too far away, someone else is shattered by a life-defining event. Some things just seem better delivered visually: the simplicity of 11.34 on a clock owned by a character who works a back shift and has just got up; we see a holiday happening rather than reading one of the many hackneyed ways it could be verbalised. You can show the layout of websites the reader may recognise, and it seems undeniable that panels better evoke the state of being tired in half-light and clicking on stupid shit, and for a longer duration, than most novelists (other than maybe Tao Lin) would bother with. The art style really seems to come into its own here, as part of the cocooned feeling people have when they do such things.

It was around pp.70-80 when I felt real heft from this book; it had been seeming pretty clever, but then, something was sealed in the way it addressed what happened when the videotape of Sabrina’s murder surfaced: the local journalists, middle-aged and totally uncool but professional and human, the police interactions with the characters, and details like the unstereotypical realness of a landlord who wore shorts.

The only drawback was that, a bit later, it didn't really match the verbal and emotional urgency of real-life accounts of being caught up in conspiracy theories, like the account by the father of one of the Sandy Hook children. Or was that due to Calvin's personality and occupational experience? (Also, I wasn’t sure if Calvin would really be able to get the Special Investigations job after this happened. Would he not be too high a risk because of the intense scrutiny from obsessives? I would have liked it to have been explained if it didn’t matter.)

But if real-life conspiracy theory shows say things like the fictional Albert Douglas radio programme does here, then Drnaso just made me totally grok why people - people like a few friends of friends, former acquaintances and so on, not just ‘random idiots’ - fall for these things. At time of writing, I’ve never heard more than a two-minute clip of stuff like Alex Jones, focused on a contentious issue. Not all this preamble about the state of the world that would appeal across the political spectrum, and which you’d have to be doing really, really well in your life, and be at least semi-detached from the news, not to agree with at least somewhat… I’m nodding along and nodding along and only when he says the bit about the [US] government carrying out 9/11, or inventing shooting incidents, do I reject and switch off. And if the verisimilitude of the show Drnaso has created is anything like that of the online articles here, some of the real presenters must be very much like that.

Sabrina feels very very real, yet always manages to swerve being too ‘on the nose’, to mix metaphors. The closest to that Drnaso gets is when characters, having hoped for some distracting TV pabulum, end up switching on to (sod’s law; bleary, fatalistic sod’s law) a news item about the 9/11 museum, and a senior staff member at the exhibit says: “we want guests to leave with an increased sense of the value of a human life, that each one is important and won't be forgotten”… but then it’s only become even blunter to show this because of American policy and events that happened in the last few months, since the book was written.

Even if, like me, you don’t really like much of the American culture served up wherever you look, I think there’s something valuable in Sabrina: the tendencies of the media and the online world shown here are becoming almost global. Or maybe it’s even good because of not liking it, because it illustrates where all this stuff is coming from, the heart of a white Americanness that’s implicit background in that Hollywood blockbuster or New York literary novel: the Joe Averages in the flyover states who are the market or the silent cultural antagonist, but rarely talked about (at least for foreigners) in a way that is unvarnished but also, because of using fewer words and not referring to anyone’s voting habits, basically respectful.

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I wanted to write about Sabrina as a work in itself, unconnected to its Booker longlisting. Quite apart from the fact that the reviews on Goodreads will probably stay online considerably longer than the 2018 Booker Prize longlist is of interest to anyone other than a handful of geeks, Drnaso cannot be blamed for creating a work that isn’t up to Booker standards, as some posts do. A literary novelist publishing in Britain would always have it in mind. But a graphic novel has never been longlisted for the Booker before. (Although I consider that, like a female Doctor Who, it was well overdue - something some of us expected to happen quite some time ago, given prior discussions in the media*.) So it probably never would have crossed a graphic novelist’s mind to have a Booker-type set of expectations in mind. I think it’s unfair to star-rate Sabrina using its Booker Prize appropriateness as a criterion, although ranking it in the longlist as a separate exercise is an entirely different matter.

The Booker should be introducing readers to the work of authors that will wow them. I'm not quite as bowled over by Sabrina as I was by Paul Beatty's The Sellout or Richard Powers' Orfeo but it is very very good, and I'd certainly read more by Nick Drnaso if I had the opportunity.

(read and reviewed August 2018; the review on Goodreads.)


* Postscript with further explanation: in 2013, the chair of that year's Booker judges and one other said that they would welcome graphic novels and would have been happy to list one if they had found one good enough. As far as I'm concerned it's been pending since then. And as far as Doctor Who is concerned, I read something as a kid in the 1980s which suggested that there would be a female Doctor sooner or later, and it seemed like a matter of course, not least because a female prime minister was all I was old enough to remember at that point. So it seemed bizarre that people still thought there was anything odd about this recently. It's impossible now to trace where I read it (I thought it was the Radio Times) but it may have been extrapolating from a 1981 interview in which Tom Baker said “Well, you’re making an assumption that it’s going to be a man.” Or perhaps someone in the media had a tip about the behind the scenes discussions from 1986, which came to light in 2010.