Annabel Gaskell reviews Five Different Stories

A lovely review from Annabel Gaskell of Five Different Stories About One Thing. She talks about its relationship to Astral Travel (which she gave a smashing review when it came out), saying that although the stories work perfectly on their own, there is 'another dimension' if you've read the novel. And she 'love[s] the combination of writing with the art', and calls it a 'lovely little book'. 

Held by Anne Michaels

Clare suggested this book, remembering that she had liked Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces when we read it. The book has been hugely praised by critics and was shortlisted for the Booker, but I’m afraid that in the event our reaction was markedly different.

 

It begins with very short sections, some only one sentence long, which take the viewpoint of John, a soldier lying wounded in Cambrai, France, in 1917, and thinking he is dying. These sections consist of the aphoristic thoughts that move through his mind – 'We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?' (This is the very first two-sentence section, which poses the central question of the book); 'We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known' – and memories of his lover, Helena, and his mother.

 

Clare said she liked the novel when she began it, since the preoccupations and the fragmented structure were suitable for the mentality of an apparently dying man, but the whole novel turned out to be structured and pitched in this sonorous way, and she quickly tired of it. There was unanimous agreement in the group. In this style, the novel moves non-chronologically between the years of the twentieth century and between European countries, picking up on moments in the lives of the war-surviving John and his wife Helena, of Anna, the daughter Helena conceives before John commits suicide, of Anna’s daughter Mara, who, like Anna before her, is a doctor working in war zones, and of those with whom they connect, sometimes only briefly, including also in its sweep others unconnected with them: Eastern European dissidents on the run and a period in the life of Marie Curie.

 

The problem was, we found, that in spite of this theoretical sweep, it was hard to distinguish between the characters: every character thought and talked the same, asking each other and themselves over and over the same question about life and death posed at the beginning. In fact, every character talks and thinks as the author writes. People complained that it was hard sometimes to tell whether thoughts were meant to be those of a character, or were simply those of the author, and it seemed to me that there was no real distinction, they were indeed conflated. This is perhaps a legacy of Anne Michaels' prior and parallel practice in poetry, with its mode of direct authorial address. There is also much that seems arcane and abstruse, perhaps more admissible in poetry which requires a more contemplative mode of reading than does a novel. There is constant reference to scientific theories that potentially pose the possibility of unknown dimensions, not all of it the kind of science that is commonly known. On the second page of the novel, the wounded John (or perhaps the author?) contemplates:

Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.

 None of us knew what Lagrangian meant, and those of us who Googled it encountered an explanation that was not easy for the non-scientifically or -mathematically trained, and gave up trying to relate it to John’s situation. There are also, as some of us had found in Fugitive Pieces, statements that sounded profound, but that, once examined, made no sense:

Even when he had no tears left, he would have tears for Anna.

 We also found the characters and their relationships unrealistically, indeed sentimentally idealised: every character loves their parent unconditionally and every parent their child; each sexual partnership is perfect and instantly established by love at first sight and a tacit knowledge of permanent togetherness, with an almost fetishistic stress on the beauty or sentimental value of women’s handbags and scarves, and bonds frequently sparked or sealed within the romantic ambience of snow. Every character – apart, as Clare pointed out, from the artist Helena poses for in later life – is good: well-intentioned and loyal and capable of huge love (and intent on grasping the truth about the continuance of life and love after death)..

 

Nearly every critic praising the book has mentioned its ‘beautiful prose’ – a suspiciously vague term in itself – but we found the prose simply pretentious. We also found the whole thing static, repetition being its essence, with its movement forward and back in time without any obvious further insight to the same central question, and with the lack of differentiation between the characters - even the names are passed down the generations, increasing the effect

 

Critics have pointed out that the book proposes love as the crucial antidote to the horrors of war with which it begins, and which Anna and her daughter Mara experience as doctors. But as I said to the group, in reality things are not so clear-cut and binary. Relationships and people are far more complex than the idealised versions presented here, and it is indeed the same human flaws that complicate personal relationships (and which novels classically examine) that also lead in the wider context to war. Apart from which, the horrors of war are not truly tackled in his book: they are not directly depicted. Although John does eventually commit suicide (prompted by a realisation that he has not in fact captured proof of the afterlife in his professional photos), at the beginning we are party not to his physical pain or the horrors he experienced prior to the moment, but to his somewhat removed thoughts and memories. Some of the horrors Mara and her war-photographer lover Alan have seen are recalled, but only from the comfort of the home to which they have retreated, and as the thing from which their love does indeed cushion them. We are meant to believe that they have been war-traumatised, but there is little evidence apart from a certain disillusion about life on Alan’s part, greatly eased by their love. And, as I said to the group, their memories of the moment of their meeting seriously romanticise the explosion in which they are involved at the time:

In the ruins, the smoke chafed the back of her throat, but it was dry and quiet and she slept like a stone. When she woke, she saw him sleeping next to her. Later Alan would tell the story of how he had found her. But she would never forget the feeling that she had found him, simply by opening her eyes.

Our members Ann and John both noted similarities in the solipsism of this book with that we found in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. The group as a whole pondered the fact that this book has received such lavish praise, and Ann said she felt it was a similar instance of the emperor's new clothes. I noted that some of the reviewers had caught the soulfulness of tone and impenetrability of meaning, the Sunday Times declaring that 'Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality', which made everyone laugh. Margeret said roundly in conclusion that if she'd wanted to ponder at length whether life goes on after death, she'd have gone to church.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here  

Reading Group: When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola

Ann suggested this book alongside Lord of the Rings (we take turns to make suggestions, and always suggest two for the rest to choose from), since the blurb implies a similar kind of scenario: a group of people, in this case a family, ‘grow[ing] up wild’ on the land, in this case on the ‘hulking Pyrenees’. In fact, it turned out to be a very different kind of book altogether.

 

It does indeed begin, as the blurb tells us, with the death by lightning of a young farmer, Domenec, and we do get to learn of the fates of his family as the years go by, and it is true that the book ends with a moving reconciliation for one of the family members. But the story of the family is not foregrounded throughout the book, and the point is to illustrate that it is only one thread in an interconnected biosphere. Domenec’s death is related dispassionately, not by any conventional narrator, but by the collective voice of the clouds that bring the lightning that kill him. They note the ghosts of women once killed as witches approaching the body and then picking up the chanterelle mushrooms for which he had been foraging, and moving on. The next chapter is related by one of those ghosts, telling of how they were tortured. Each chapter is devoted to a new and different narrator, human or non-human: we hear Domenec’s widow, a roe deer, the mountains themselves telling the tale of their geological upheaval, a ghost of the Spanish Civil War, and the chanterelles with their (symbolically) interconnected mycelium – ‘the cap of one is the cap of us all … the spores of one are the spores of us all … the story of one is the story of us all’. 

 

This might all sound difficult, fragmented, and possibly pretentious, but in fact the book avoids entirely the archness to which it might have succumbed, while reading like a fluid dream. We were all captivated by the lyrical yet earthy prose, the authentic feel of every viewpoint and the author’s astounding empathy. The chapter taking the viewpoint of a dog made us laugh out loud - we agreed it was one of best and funniest things we’d ever read. It seemed to us that the translation from the Catalan, by Mara Faye Lethem, was excellent. Ann and Doug were very taken by the fairytale and folklore references threaded throughout, which add to the dream-like quality and underpin the sense of history and time. The book constitutes a moving plea for respect for the earth and its ecosystem, and we were indeed both delighted and moved.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Bookmunch reviews Five Different Stories About One Thing, and a launch date.

Here's another very nice review of Five Different Stories About One Thing, this time from Bookmunch. It's very complimentary about the Confingo series of collaborative mini-collections to which the book belongs, and says that FDSAOT 'maintains the high standards'. 'You can play an interesting game,' says the reviewer, working out what the 'one thing' is that links the stories (each written in a different genre): 'Violence, Family? Betrayal? Secrets? Legacy?' Well, as they indicate, it's all of these things, but for me the most important are the first and last - the legacy of violence, the way violence can have an impact down the generations, and whether or not, in subsequent generations, it can be eradicated or overcome. 

And we now have a launch date. We'll be celebrating the publication at the lovely Saul Hay Gallery in Castlefield (see picture below) on 27th May at 7.30. I'll read from the book, and writer and short fiction professor Ailsa Cox will quiz me about it. It's a free event - with a glass of wine! - but you are asked to book HERE.

Obviously the book will be available to buy at the event, but you can also get it HERE. 

New Publication: Five Different Stories About One Thing.

It's a long time since I've posted on here anything but the reports of our reading group discussions, but the publication today of my new mini collection prompts me to do so. I'm really thrilled with this little book - it's so beautifully produced by Confingo, with such wonderful care and attention. It's the seventh in a series of collaborations between writers and artists, and I'm truly delighted with the stunning full-colour artwork by Laura Scott which echoes so thoughtfully the themes and ideas of the stories.

The stories can be read as self-contained yet are linked by their characters and a past trauma shared by all of them. Each story is cast in a different genre which illustrates the particularity of the effect on each character and on his or her outlook, and the way that, while the experience connects them it also isolates them from each other. So there's a ghost story, a love story (of sorts), crime, science fiction, and a postmodern story. Read as a whole, however, their connections and implications grow. (At least, I hope they do!)

This mixed-genre idea was in fact an idea I had a long time ago, and at one point thought of using for my novel Astral Travel, but abandoned it, as the story of Astral Travel was complicated enough in itself! So what I've done here is take a similar set of characters, but apply the idea to a less complex situation.

And publication day has come with a lovely review from Jackie Law who concludes 'The stories within are just asking to be reread. This is a book I will keep'. Thank you, Jackie!

Five Different Stories About One Thing is available from Confingo Publishing. 

Reading Group: Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou

Warning: Plot spoil

Margeret's latest suggestion was this widely acclaimed and International Booker long-listed book set in the People's Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the Marxist-Leninist Revolution of the late 1960s. In 1970 our first-person narrator is a boy in a harsh orphanage, taking succour from the pastoral approach of the visiting priest, Papa Moupelo. It is Papa Moupelo who has given him his name, a long name in  Moupelo's own language, Lingala, which means 'Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors' - inevitably shortened to Moses - which imbues Moses with a fundamental if primitive sense of mission and justice. His sense of injustice will lead him to avenge his bullied best friend, Bonaventure, with chilli pepper, which earns him the nickname 'Little Pepper' (the title of the original French edition). One day Papa Moupela fails to appear: the new, anti-religion regime has taken over the orphanage, and there is a suggestion that he may have been disappeared. The harshness increases. Eventually Moses escapes with two others for the metropolis of Pointe-Noire (leaving Bonaventure behind), where their only choice is to join a street gang of petty thieves. Eventually Moses finds a kind of peace with a house of prostitutes, and the madam finds him a job in the docks and a hut in which to live. But then, during a purge of 'Zairian whores', Moses turns up one day to find the brothel house razed to rubble and the prostitutes 'disappeared'. Distraught, Moses descends into madness, vainly consulting various doctors, eventually dressing himself as a latter-day Robin Hood and setting out with a knife to avenge his 'little adopted family'.

On the whole we found the book an interesting and mainly enjoyable read. It is written with a kind of naif yet skewering wit we all enjoyed - Moses refers to his 'kilometrically extended name' - and Ann commented on the skill of the translator, Helen Stevenson, in capturing it. However, we all found the book 'front-heavy', as I think Clare put it. It is divided into two Parts of equal length. Part 1 deals with the time in the orphanage, covering in some detail the few years of Moses' early adolescence and the fascist idiocies of the regime. The pace is consequently measured, and in fact Doug said he found the section repetitive. It ends with Moses's escape. Part 2 opens when Moses has already been in the street gang for three years, and goes on to cover the years right into his middle age, its narrative sweep thus pacier and more eventful.  There seems no real narratorial significance in the initial leap, and the absence of any portrayal of Moses's arrival in the city and his adjustment to life there seemed to all of us a lack after the detailed treatment in Part 1. In fact, as Doug pointed out, Moses's escape at the end of Part 1 seems rushed and inadequately explained, as if the writer was just impatient to get on with the street scenes, and it is perhaps telling that most reviews give the impression that the more eventful Part 2 constitutes the main bulk of the book.

Doug said that although Moses's mix of childish, sometimes clumsy, yet insightful vocabulary is amusing, there are sentiments and a political understanding expressed in Part 1 that wouldn't in fact have been available to a young boy, and which smacked of the author's own voice and perspective. Others agreed. I thought this could be excused to some extent by the fact that, as we discover at the end, the whole thing is a memoir written by Moses in a penitentiary for the criminally insane, and the problem perhaps was that there was no indication of this at the start to make us read the book in that context.

At the end of the book, Moses is back where he started: the penitentiary is built on the sight of the orphanage, and Bonaventure is still there (using a different name, rather than that of the father who abandoned him), still obsessed with the planes flying over and expecting one some day to take him away. That, as someone pointed out, should make for a very sad book - and on one level it does - but there is a feel of survival in the lively prose of this fictional memoir, and of course the very act of writing it constitutes for Moses a triumph.  

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

This book which has sold millions of copies worldwide was suggested by John as, I think, something of a provocation, since our group is deeply suspicious of hype, and several people in our group had consequently avoided reading it. Once it was suggested, however, everyone decided that we should give it objective attention and read it.

It is the first-person narration of Frances, who relates how, one summer when she and her female fellow student and ex-partner Bobbi are performing their poetry together in Dublin, they meet an older couple, the reasonably well-known and glamorous photographer Melissa and her actor husband Nick. Frances embarks on an affair with Nick, and the novel charts the push-me-pull-you course of their relationship, and the effects of it on their relationships with the other two.

Reactions to the book in the group were interesting. All but one of us who had read it found it a fairly quick, indeed compulsive read, with a smooth prose that pushes things along at pace. Margaret liked the book unequivocally, but she was the only one to do so.  Clare said she did enjoy it as she read it (others, including me, agreed) but when she got to the end she questioned whether it had amounted to very much in terms of substance and theme. Others had substantial criticisms, and Ann said she really hated the book and wouldn't have finished it had it not been for our impending discussion.

What Ann said she hated was the characters - she really disliked every one of them - and much of the discussion centred on the character of the protagonist and narrator Frances. It was generally agreed that Frances was a very damaged character - self-consciousness and vulnerability seem to be what characterise her, and she self harms, pinching herself and even cutting a hole in her leg as a way of dealing emotionally with situations. However, people pointed out that this is simply laid out for the reader and never really addressed on any deep psychological level: there is no real indication of why she should be like this, apart perhaps from the fact that her father is alcoholic, with one possible hint that she and her mother had needed sometimes to avoid her father. Introducing the book, John had said that he found it interesting for Frances's masochism. At one point, when they are in bed together, Frances asks Nick to hit her, although he refuses. Clare pointed out that that's a known pattern, that abuse in childhood can lead to masochism, but none of us felt that the book made any conscious or satisfactory connection between these things.

I said that I thought a curious thing about Frances's character was that although she seemed so vulnerable much of the time, there was in fact a certain arrogance about her, although everyone else in the group was surprised at this idea. It is Frances, after all, who first makes a move on Nick, kissing him at a party with his wife nearby, and there is surely an arrogance about the fact that when she sends off her first short story after being introduced to an editor, she doesn't even bother reading through the draft before doing so (and of course it's immediately accepted.) As a result, a lot of her self-consciousness - the constant care about what impression she is making on people, what she should wear etc - seemed to me to tip over into self-obsession. When she and Bobbi are first invited to Melissa's house, as they travel with her in the taxi, Frances's thoughts are for herself rather than their new acquaintance: 

I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger's home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming.

There's a lot of obsession with how beautiful and interesting Melissa keeps making Frances look in her photographs, however surprised Frances purports to be by this, constant stress on what she (or Nick) is wearing at each pivotal moment, and when Melissa's sponsor-publisher visits while the four are staying in her French house, her only interest for Frances, and, more importantly, for the novel, is how much attention she pays Frances (none, until she finds she is a writer). I have read quotes from reviews that call  this novel funny, and I assume those reviewers were taking the characters' self-obsession as ironically intended, but our group had read it all as deadly serious. As the novel develops, Frances suffers severe and debilitating period pain which turns out to be caused by endometriosis, which can in no way be seen as ironically intended, but which seems to me to be the novel over-egging, indeed over-dramatising her vulnerability, since it is not integrated in any deep way with theme or even in fact plot. 

Doug said, to the agreement of others, that in fact you never get to know the characters, they are cyphers. The novel is titled Conversations With Friends, but Doug said 'What conversations?' The title may be ironically intended since there is a lot not said between the characters and consequent unknowing, but it is problematic that there is little in the way of character-revealing dialogue between the characters. So little, too, is actually described, so that there is not much sense of atmosphere, and Doug and others said that as a result they just couldn't engage. Ann said she hated the way the novel simply named areas of Dublin without giving any indication of what they were like, which meant that if you didn't know them, which she didn't, you couldn't envisage them or know their atmosphere.

People said that they didn't know what the novel was supposed to be about. I said that my main problem with it is that I think a political point is intended which is not in fact fulfilled. Bobbi and Frances espouse leftwing politics, and I feel it's meant to be politically significant that Frances is relatively poor while the other characters are not: it's a fundamental part of her vulnerability. But the plot, such as it is, does nothing to promote the politics, indeed it undermines them, as it is focussed without critique on the retrograde scenario of a woman masochistically in thrall to a man. (It is true that Nick, it will turn out, has deep emotional problems of his own, but again these are not addressed.) Another problem for me, and others, was that the novel is lacking a narrative arc. Throughout, the relationship between Frances and Nick waxes and wanes and waxes once again, and there is never a sense of denouement or revelation. Everyone agreed that they thought they had got to the end of the novel at a point when the relationship finally seems over (and when we could perhaps draw a conclusion about the meaning of it all), only for the final scene to upend this, and for the last words of the novel to be Frances's phone request to a clearly compliant Nick: 'Come and get me'.

Margeret protested against our negativity, saying that the book was beautifully written. Mark, our ex-member back on a visit, pointed out that being beautifully written on the sentence level is not enough for a novel, that there are many other elements, such as structure, theme etc, that need to be successful, and Doug added, and yes, it needs to convince. Margaret laughed and said that she was convinced and she was engaged by the characters.

However, Ann asked why on earth the novel has been so very popular and successful, and others suggested that perhaps it appealed to a younger demographic than ourselves. I did wonder afterwards if it is the very self-obsession of the characters that had endeared them to a generation of TikTokers obsessed with lifestyle and image.

Finally, John noted the book's debt to Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which we discussed here), another novel about two young girls, an introspective narrator and her more outgoing friend, in which the narrator becomes involved with a married man - and which Ann said roundly was the far superior book.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut.

I suggested this novel which takes the form of the confession of Howard W Campbell Jr, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison after the Second World War. His war crime has been to have made broadcasts in Germany for the Nazi regime, whipping up vicious hatred towards Jews. In fact, however, Campbell was an American agent, and his broadcasts contained coded messages for the Americans. His problem now is that this was so secret that there is no one to come forward and vouch for him and save him. The US government 'neither confirms or denies I was an agent of theirs.' Resigned to his fate, he writes his memoir-confession. Here he describes how, as an entirely apolitical playwright of German-American origin living in Germany, whose plays are enthusiastically patronised by the Nazis, he is approached on a park bench and recruited by an agent, Frank Wirtanen (whom the American government now denies ever served in any of their branches). Witanen suggests that he uses his Nazi connections to gain a position of influence in the regime. What follows is a tale of double-dealings, in which Nazis can turn out to be undercover Jews, a wife can turn out to have been replaced by an imposter who can then turn out to be a Russian agent, and a post-war leader of a right-wing cult with rabid hatred for Jews, Catholics and Black people can blindly recruit members from those very groups, all prefaced by a section in which Campbell describes his Israeli prison guards, some of whom turn out to be ex-Nazis.

All of this is told in Vonnegut's own wry, wise voice, rendering the deadly tragedy via black comedy. Introducing the book, I said that I consider it brilliant. I love Vonnegut's voice and the book's concern with moral ambiguity and its message that fascism does not die, which makes it very relevant to today. Everyone agreed. Ann said she thought that the fact that the book is blackly comic - thus engaging the reader - made the book particularly powerful and its message all the more chilling, and again we all agreed.

There was quite a lot of discussion of Campbell's attitudes. I said I thought that the book was a condemnation of apoliticism and political unawareness, and a warning of their dangers. It is Campbell's apoliticism which allows him to be recruited in the way he is (and for which he was probably recruited):  he says he did it simply because he thought of himself as a 'ham', an actor. But there are terrible consequences: in bleakly comic and tragic scenes, Campbell discovers that people took up the racist suggestions in his broadcasts. Someone in the group noted the connection with Bolano's By Night in Chile, which we read recently, in which the protagonist  blinds himself to the political atrocities around him.

While much of the novel operates as dark comedy, there are moments of deadly serious authorial passion, such as this vivid depiction of the totalitarian mind:

...a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random... The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined... The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases ... The wilful filing off of gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information ...

 That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference towards slave women and love for a blue vase -

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -

A stunning book, we all agreed, and went on to discuss our own political situation, which only goes to prove its contemporary relevance.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here