Adventures in reading
I am back at the European Literature Network with a review of a novel first published in French in 1976, and now published in English translation by NYRB Classics. Crazy Genie is the tale of a mother and daughter, structured around the patterns that define their lives in the countryside – with trauma that bursts out of the novel’s rhythms and goes straight to the heart.
I’m a little late reporting this, but we on the shadow panel now have our shortlist:
Two-thirds of our shortlist is the same as the official shortlist, but both lists still feel quite different to me overall. I wonder if we’ll choose the same winner as each other this year.
This week is a new ‘club’ week hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, with a focus on books published in 1961. I’ve picked out this novel, which was reissued last year in Faber Editions.
British author Jennifer Dawson (1929-2000) draws on her experiences as both a patient and a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. The Ha-Ha was written shortly after the Mental Health Act 1959, which I understand was intended partly to move mental health treatment from institutional settings into the community. Dawson’s protagonist, Josephine, is on the edge of this change: she’s a patient at an institution who is allowed out to work, and waits to be “regraded” (and, one assumes, released) by the committee.
Josephine has had a breakdown while at university in Oxford. The particular incident that led to her being committed was when she laughed uncontrollably at a tea party, where she had visions of the other people as animals. The outside world now seems a long way away, even though she can come and go to an extent. Just in front of the institution’s outer wall is a ha-ha (a sloping hidden ditch), which represents the gap between here and there for Josephine. She meets Alasdair, one of the male patients, at the bottom of the ha-ha one day, and he proves to be the only person she can really talk to comfortably.
I don’t know much about the history of conceptions of mental health, but Dawson’s novel struck me as quite contemporary in the way it depicts Josephine as having her own way of looking at the world, and wondering why she’s puzzled when most other people seem to just ‘get it’. She says:
I used to take in with amazement this poised, confident world of men and women who never seemed to have any doubts about existence.
Or take this, one of the lines I found sharpest in the book:
I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.
One of the scenes that most sticks in my memory comes when Josephine is invited to a party, and finds the conversation sliding around her, and is unable to grab on to it:
Each time my turn came to lay a contribution I found myself catapulted into this empty space in the middle of nothing, discussing with no one but myself the longevity of badgers or Myra’s thorny spider.
The layering of conversational, mental and physical space on top of each other is striking. For Josephine, leaving the institution would not just open up the world. It would be the chance to make her own meaning, to think and feel in the way that’s right for her. That is why so much is as stake in The Ha-Ha.
International Booker Prize season begins! The 2026 shortlist has been announced:
I don’t have much to say as I hadn’t heard of most of the books. But there are quite a few familiar authors there, and I’m looking forward to exploring the list. As always, I will be reading along with the Shadow Panel, and writing about the books here as and when I can. Off we go!
After an extended break, I’m making another attempt at getting back into blogging at least semi-regularly. Maybe it will only be for specific occasions, or a couple of times a month, or maybe longer – let’s see.
Stu at Winstondad’s Blog is hosting a Hungarian Literature Month this February. I’ve decided to revisit Ágota Kristóf, who escaped from Hungary to Switzerland in 1956 at the age of 21, when the Hungarian Revolution was suppressed, and subsequently wrote in French. I have previously written about Kristóf’s Notebook trilogy (see here and here). Today I’m looking at I Don’t Care, a story collection originally published in 2004, and now issued as part of the Penguin International Writers series in Chris Andrews’ translation.
When I read Kristóf’s trilogy, I was struck by how austere the writing seemed, flattening out details of place and time – and yet how deeply felt it still was. That impression remained with this story collection: the title I Don’t Care seems very much ironic to me.
For example, ‘The Invitation’ consists largely of a husband’s dialogue as he enthuses over throwing a birthday party for his wife, Madeleine, despite her being clear that she he doesn’t want one. After the party, the friends have left, the husband is asleep, and Madeleine is left to clear things away. The piece ends on a simple statement: “she goes to the bathroom and takes a long look at herself in the mirror.” But there’s such a weight of unspoken emotion behind that statement, coming as it does after we’ve seen Madeleine crowded out of her own story and life.
Reality itself can seem to shift when mediated through Kristóf’s prose. ‘The House’ begins with a ten-year-old boy aghast at the thought of anyone moving away: “You can’t do that, leave one house for another; it’s terrible, like if someone got killed.” A few years later, though, the boy has moved house himself. He goes back to visit the old place, but feels betrayed when he finds that someone else has moved in. Time then races ahead in the story, with the boy never quite able to recapture the sense of connection he had with the house. By story’s end, in an uncertain time and place, the boy is an old man revisiting the house, or maybe he’s the ten-year-old yet to leave. Beating underneath it all is the longing to keep hold of the past.
‘Wrong Numbers’ encapsulates my experience of reading Kristóf’s stories. Its protagonist often finds people dialling his number by mistake. He tells of one occasion when he received a call from a woman meaning to ring Marcel, an acquaintance or possible lover of hers. After a conversation, the woman invites the protagonist to meet at a café the next day. He accepts, and changes his appearance to suit what she likes – but he is not happy with the stranger he now sees in the mirror:
He’s better than I am, more handsome, younger, but he’s not me. I wasn’t as good, or as handsome, or as young, but I was used to what I was.
This is a moment of reflection in two senses, and the patterning in Andrews’ translation there illustrates how space is opened up for the protagonist to think, when he might so far have seemed to act largely on impulse. I find it easy to underestimate how much Kristóf’s prose draws me in, because it seems so unassuming at first. But there is a whole world of lost opportunity in this tale of a misdialled phone call – and I can say something analogous across the stories in I Don’t Care.
I’m back at Strange Horizons with a review of Nina Allan’s latest novel, A Granite Silence. It’s an exploration of a historical murder case, which on the face of it might seem a sharp turn away from the fantastical work Allan is largely known for. But she approaches the case as a network of jostling and intersecting stories, and the resulting book is distinctively hers, and fascinating to read.
Right, it’s Goldsmiths Prize season. 2025 has not been a prolific year for me in terms of either reading or blogging, and I don’t like that one bit. Maybe a read-along with one of my favourite awards will revitalise things.
The Goldsmiths Prize is for “fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” This year’s shortlist was announced last night, and our contenders are:
I haven’t read any of the books to date, and don’t have any preconceptions, so there is not much else for me to say right now. The titles above will turn into links as and when I post reviews. The winner will be announced on 5 November, so let’s see how far I get. Here’s to the journey!
Hello, it’s been a while. I have been taking a break from the world of blogging; hopefully now I can get back into it. August brings us Women in Translation Month, so here goes…
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If one word comes to mind when I’m thinking about the stories in Heuijung Hur’s Failed Summer Vacation (translated from Korean by Paige Aniyah Morris), it is ‘disconnection’. Disconnection in the characters, yes, but also in the fabric of the stories themselves.
My favourite story is ‘Imperfect Pitch’, which introduces us to Baek, who drifts through life and spends most of his time checking a fancafe for the titular rock band. The band are defunct, but the cafe just about keeps going. The story begins with Baek reading about the death of O, a long-time fan of Imperfect Pitch, and a driving force behind the fancafe.
From there, the story splits into three strands: there’s the fancafe in the present day, where it becomes apparent that no one really knew O, despite her centrality. There is the time Baek went to Imperfect Pitch’s farewell show, buying a ticket from O and picking it up from a station locker, without ever meeting her. Further back, there is Baek’s discovery of the band at university, and the time he performed one of their songs at a student society concert.
In each strand, we then see people ultimately failing to come together despite being in institutions meant to facilitate that (the fancafe, the student music club). Likewise, the three strands remain separate on the page, apart from a striking moment that merges Baek’s student performance with the final Imperfect Pitch show – and which highlights Baek’s isolation even back then.
(An extract from ‘Imperfect Pitch’ is available on the Wasafiri website.)
Failed Summer Vacation is full of striking images and imaginative turns, leading to stories that don’t necessarily lend themselves to easy interpretation, but instead nag at the mind. A good example is ‘Loaf Cake’, which begins with the narrator’s partner (housemate? companion?) Sand leaving the house, after which she, the narrator, loses the ability to speak.
The narrator then needs to find a new means of connection, and she begins to find this with a baker named Snow and his delicious creations, especially the loaf cake that the narrator devours each time she visits his shop. Then Sand returns, but he appears to have walked so far that his very self is crumbling away. It’s the images and sensations that linger longest: as so often in these stories, there’s the nagging sense that true connection lies just out of reach of Hur’s characters.
Failed Summer Vacation is published by Scratch Books.
I’m back writing for European Literature Network, in their #RivetingReviews section. The book I’ve got for you this time is Wild Boar, a striking novel by Finland Swedish author Hannah Lutz (translated from Swedish by Andy Turner). It follows three characters in the forests of southern Sweden, and looks at their relationship with nature, as symbolised by the local wild boar. It is also the first novel for adults published by The Emma Press — and, on the strength of this, I look forward to seeing what may follow.
I have a new review up at Strange Horizons this week. I’m looking at an Argentinian novel, Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery and published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail. It’s a hallucinatory ride about a human-mosquito hybrid trying to find meaning in a future where the divide between the haves and have-nots has been sharpened by climate change. That is not the half of it, though. As I say in the review, I have rarely read a novel that destroys itself with such gleeful abandon.
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