 | Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata {Reviewed by STELLA} Meet Keiko, our anti-heroine. She’s an oddball character who has never fitted in. Finding work at a convenience store was a great relief to her family, who worried endlessly about what she would do with her life. They saw this part-time job as a great starting place for the eighteen-year-old, and for Keiko, the job - with its uniform, the precise order of the products, the store slogans called out with absolute enthusiasm - is a revelation, the first time in her life that she’s felt part of something. Being told what to say, and when, makes her ‘normal’. Now she’s been doing this for eighteen years - we meet thirty-six-year-old Keiko at the store being the perfect worker but increasingly questioned by her friends and family. Why is she still in this dead-end job? If she isn’t going to move on, she will, naturally, have to marry. When the lazy, cynical Shiraha is employed at her store, Keiko is repulsed and intrigued by him. As he shirks his responsibilities and laments being hassled about it, churning out his favourite phrase “things haven’t changed since the Stone Age”, it’s not too long until he is fired, his greatest misdemeanour being that he is looking for a wife - someone to ‘finance’ his life! After hitting on all the female staff - except for Keiko, who he sees as an old maid, not worth considering - he tries the customers, and this is his undoing. One evening, Keiko finds him hanging around outside the store, homeless and skint, and takes pity on him. However, Keiko has plans of her own. Keiko wants to please her sister (now married with a baby) and her parents (who constantly ask her if there is anything to report - both relieved and concerned that nothing has changed) and works up a plan to become 'normal'. Taking Shiraha into her tiny flat, they settle into a routine. Keiko goes to work and pays the bills, while Shiraha stays hidden (he wants to be left alone - he owes money to his brother, and his sister-in-law is on his case), making a comfortable place for himself in the bath (cushions and internet connection are all he needs). Keiko brings him food, most of which he complains about, from the convenience store - dented cans and expired use-by-date produce. He is her ‘pet’. Being a ‘couple’ takes the heat off Keiko and suddenly she is seen as normal by her colleagues, her old friends from school, and her family - no matter what Shiraha is like: a useless parasite. That she finally, at 36, has a man living in her apartment fills those around her with glee. Finally, Shiraha decides it is time for Keiko to leave the convenience store and better herself. Keiko is quite happy to go - everyone treats her differently now that she is ‘with’ Shiraha. Yet always she is drawn to the lights, sounds and pleasures of the convenience store - the hum, the stacks of cans and containers and the ever-changing specials. Charming, quirky and deadpan funny, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is her tenth novel but the first to be translated into English. Murata works part-time in a convenience store. |
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Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Who eats in a cage? Or with a caged mouth?” There is either writing or not-writing (even though not-writing may be as specific concerning what is not written as writing is concerning what is), and the dividing line between the two is not so much a wall as a cliff, an inequality more effective than a barrier. Anne Boyer’s collection of prose poems, Garments Against Women, is everywhere alert to the ways in which the world as experienced by those who live in it is riven by inequalities. Those who wield a power or who benefit from the wielding of that power have little perceptual overlap with those upon whom that power is wielded or who suffer from the wielding of that power, but, interestingly, the advantaged live in a world of more restricted truth, even though the disadvantaged may feel the effects of this restriction. This asymmetry acts as a constraint upon those to whom falls more heavily the burden of existing, “lives diminished by the arrangement of the world,” their time forced into objects and taken from them by what is termed an ‘economic system’. Boyer’s poems interrogate her relationship with objects, for instance the garments she sews or that she buys from thrift shops: “the fabric still contains the hours of the lives.” Can these hours have their value restored? For whose benefit have these hours been put into objects? If “writing is the manufacture of impossible desires,” can we write of or read of objects without involving ourselves in the mechanisms by which time is taken asymmetrically from workers? Is it possible for an object to not exist except as a vicarious object, “an object which exists only as it might exist to another”? Are all objects more vicarious than not? “I am the dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs,” writes Boyer. How it is possible to write, even to imagine writing, even if one had the time to write, without writing ‘garments’ that are designed by and are to the benefit of those who have confined ‘writing’ in the narrow world of their advantage? Whose roles must be challenged and overhauled? “I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping", writes Boyer, an self-described “addict of denial”, in the poem ‘A Woman Shopping’. “It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing.” Everyone is smothered by their role: “If a woman has no purse we will imagine one for her.” “Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing,” but the real struggle is “not between actor and actor. It’s between actors and the stage.” Boyer’s poems provide subtle and often surprising insights into the relationships between individuals and their roles, desires and scripts, personal and societal misfortunes, struggle and survival, despair and surprising joy. Can writing effect real change? “I thought to have a name was to become an object,” writes Boyer. “I thought I was a charlatan. I was mistaken. I was not a charlatan, I was a search term.” |
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The Testaments by Margaret Atwood {Reviewed by STELLA}
Hailed as 'the book of our time', Margaret Atwood takes us back to Gilead in her much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale: The Testaments. And a testament it is. It’s fifteen years since the doors closed on Offred, and we are quickly absorbed again into the world of Gilead through the witness accounts of its fall by two women: 'Witness Testimony 369A' and 'Witness Testimony 369B'. These 'found transcripts' are now studied along with other records of the women of Gilead. As you can imagine, these are far and few considering the scant access to (and inability to read) the written word by those who lived in Gilead. The most compromising and informative manuscript is known as 'The Ardua Hall Holograph', written by Aunt Lydia — one of the four founding Aunts. And in we go, into Gilead and into the walls of the silenced. Here we are buried knee-deep in treachery, in bullying and political machinations — in a society bereft of honesty and bound by dogma. Lydia and the founding Aunts hold powerful positions within this structure, yet this substructure does little but feed the demands of the Commanders (the elite) and is at the mercy of their whims. Lydia as the appointed leader has played a poker-faced game — always wary of Commander Judd, playing her cards with humility but always (she hopes) with a trump up her sleeve. It is a dangerous game, one that she and the Aunts cannot win, but survival is possible. The strength of The Testaments is in Lydia’s voice: complex, assured and terrified, we start right at the beginning with her. The downfall of America as it was, the destruction of democracy, and the denial of human rights to all women and most men. Lydia had been a judge and the commanders see in her abilities that will be useful to them in this autocratic regime. She has the prospect of being a ‘judge’ again, albeit one that goes against all her beliefs — deciding who will be a Handmaid, an Aunt, an Econowife, a Wife; how crimes of men, as well as women, will be punished — but all this within the strict code of Gilead, one that the Commanders have designed. Aunt Lydia is both revered and feared, reflecting her status in and worth to Gilead, but she has a secret — her written record (the Holograph) hidden in the depths of the inner library of Ardua Hall. The witness testimonies are from two young women, one Agnes — a daughter of a commander — and the other,a teenager living in Canada, just over the border outside Gilead. As the story unfolds, their lives become intertwined. The codes of Gilead have affected them both. Agnes, a privileged child, is ‘schooled’ by the Aunts, along with the other commanders’ daughters. They are readied for marriage — schooled in the arts of embroidery and flower arranging and indoctrinated in the rules of Gilead. When her father takes a new wife, Paula, it is quickly decided that at thirteen Agnes is ready for marriage, something she is understandably terrified of. Rescued from this plight by announcing that she has been ‘called’, she escapes into the confines of Ardua Hall to train as a Pearl Girl on the road to being an Aunt. Here she meets Jade, a meeting that will have a profound effect on her and many others in Gilead. There is much more to the plot but you will have to read The Testaments — to say more would spoil the revealing page-turner. When The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in the 1980s it felt like a dystopia, hardly believable despite its resonances in women’s rights movement of that time. But when there was renewed interest in the last few years (partly due to the television series) it felt more prescient and urgent. The increasing power of elites, the decreasing autonomy of women and minorities (think abortion laws in America, revoking of the right to peaceful protest, increased police and military power in the face of ‘terrorism’, control of media and data to shift political opinion and influence voter behaviour) makes The Testaments (and its predecessor) more vital, and frighteningly close to the edge of what could be. Are we brave enough like the women in The Testaments to fight for a humane society or are we undone by the helplessness as part of an insane society? Or are some of us complacent — unwilling to risk our small bubble of safety and superiority? These are the challenges of Gilead. It is interesting to note that Atwood does not include anything in her ‘dystopias’ that has not already occurred. Announced this week, The Testaments is the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} "It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off:” the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt. |
 | The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman It is always with some trepidation that you approach the new books of your favourite authors. There is a sense of nervous anticipation as you open the covers. Will it be as good as the others? Will it take you to new ground? I’m happy to report that I was transported to Lyra’s world and very pleased to be back in it, so engaged with her world in The Secret Commonwealth that it proved difficult to go to work or sleep. The second 'Book of Dust' takes us twenty years on from La Belle Sauvage. Lyra Silvertongue is now a young woman completing her university studies, and her life is taking a turn for the worse: her daemon Pantalaimon is angry with her, and when Pan sees a murder committed while out walking alone at night (if you know the world of Lyra, you will know that it is not normal for people to be separated from their daemons), the seemingly safe environs of Oxford and the colleges begins to unravel at an alarming rate. Danger is pursuing Lyra — someone wants her controlled, wants something from her and not in a nice way. Escaping Oxford, which is no longer a safe haven (the new master is not sympathetic to this orphan), she finds shelter with Malcolm Polstad’s family. Finally learning about her rescue in The Great Flood by the then 11-year-old Malcolm, she is both astonished by her childhood history and angry that so many secrets have been kept from her. Yet this is a different Lyra than her eleven-year-old self of Northern Lights. While still determined, there are also the more adult emotions of doubt and fear holding her back. She is questioning her beliefs, her understanding of herself and the people around her. Quarrelling one evening with Pan, he accuses her of losing her imagination — something she scoffs at and dismisses. Pan’s frustration is palpable — they are both saddened by their ability to separate physically and this has left a gaping psychological gulf that neither Lyra nor Pan can overcome. When Pan leaves her to seek answers — to find Lyra’s ‘imagination’, Lyra begins her own journey to the East. It is dangerous for her in Brytan and she needs to flee — but where can she go? Her first step is to old friends, the Gyptains, and here we meet again some of the characters from those first books in the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy. Pullman deftly pulls in the threads of Lyra's childhood and weaves in her new quests. The story-telling is as always exceptional. She must find Pan; she needs to go East. What is so special about a rose that is grown in the desert and why does the Magisterium want it so badly? Scientists and theologians alike are determined to uncover something about this material, and there seems to be a link to Dust. We follow the journeys of Pan, Lyra and Malcolm on their separate trajectories to the east: Pan in search of what is wrong at the heart of his relationship with Lyra; Lyra seeking Pan, the reason for the brutal murder and the mysteries of the invisible worlds; and Malcolm to find Lyra and, as a member of the secret organisation Oakley Street, to find out what the Magisterium is up to. Across the world, both east and west, the Magisterium has become stronger and more powerful. We see a more dictatorial state and one where political and economic machinations are affecting people adversely. There is less autonomy, a crackdown on debate and dissent, people are displaced, and inequality is on the rise, with a small elite in charge with the backing of military and police. The Secret Commonwealth is more compelling than the first in 'The Book of Dust' series but is also darker, more violent and challenging. I am awaiting with greater anticipation the third in this trilogy! If you haven’t read any of the 'Lyra' books you need to start at the beginning with Northern Lights. |
 | This Tilting World by Colette Fellous {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Tomorrow, yes, I will leave this house. I’ll abandon the village and the life here, all the faces that I love I will leave.” Following the death of a friend at sea and the murder of 38 people on her local beach at Sousse in 2015, Fellous determines that she will leave her native Tunisia, this time for good. “Even if leaving tears me apart, even if leaving destroys me, I cannot do anything else.” For those, like Fellous, whose business is words, exile, the preparation for exile, and whatever is carried into exile must consist primarily of words, and Fellous determines to write “this book that I mean to finish before daybreak, as a farewell gesture to the country.” She has found herself inseparable from Tunisia, but she has “come back to see, in order more easily to disengage.” Handling object after object, she stows her memories ready for departure, not only her own memories of growing up in Tunisia’s ancient but shrinking Jewish community, of leaving to further her (formal and informal) education in France as a teenager, of repeatedly returning to the country of her birth, but also those of her parents, especially those of her father, who left Tunisia for Paris in his sixties and never returned nor spoke of the life he had left behind, and who has recently died of a heart attack. In preparation for leaving the past behind, Fellous sets out to heal, through words, through memory, her parents’ “deep wordless wound of having left their country so brutally, as if it were a natural step: this they kept in silence, folded deep inside, like so may others, not daring to touch on or venture near it; and this I meant to feel in my turn. This they had passed down to me, it had become my wound. And perhaps, after all, it was this I had sought to treat by returning, by trying to recover their childhood.” Using a method that owes something to Proust and a style that owes something to Rimbaud (exquisitely translated into English by Sophie Lewis), Fellous’s beautiful prose moves delicately, like the most tentative and searching thought, around and between entities in her memory that are either too fragile or too awful to be approached directly. In this way she achieves what she calls, after Barthes, her “struggle for softness,” her overcoming of violence by rejecting the language of violence. “It was Barthes, there’s no question, more than my parents, who taught me to read the world, to leave nothing in limbo. All things observed, all words spoken, every silence between two words, every link between two sentences.” Fellous’s approach to draw together all elements: times, people, objects, memories, sensations; to pack her book with the great cluster of experiences that comprise what it is to be herself, to show with words how a mind can approach and encompass these experiences, all the while knowing that the past is being squeezed out of the present, excluded from a world that is changing. “Could all of us, perhaps, without knowing it, the French, the Italians, the Maltese, the Jews, the Greeks, the Muslims of this country, we who watch and play together in this cafe, in this small nowhere-town, yes, could all of us already be refugees, already hostages or prisoners, or even disappeared?” Human well-being is a precious, fragile, evanescent thing, easily destroyed, she knows. “What to make of this violence, all those dead on the beach, all the dead everywhere, they are in me, haunting my lips and my eyes.” Those expelled from their own lives have only memories as their possessions: “This is the story of so many exiles, of all those who today cross the Medierranean and die at sea, in their thousands they go, are lost in their thousands, their story is ours too, it tugs at our hearts.” Fellous knows that she must leave Tunisia, in order to prevent her memories from being overwritten by an unaccommodating world: “I know that only by leaving will I save everything that lies before me now.” She completes her book, her memory-luggage, and departs. But, in the end, even this last leaving is uncertain: “I knew I could not do it — I couldn’t help it, I would always be returning.” |
