 | I’ve been so busy with preparations, I’d forgotten how it feels when that first box of books arrives. So I was especially touched when the delivery man remembered bringing my debut more than three years ago. If a man who doesn’t even know me could connect with that excitement, surely I could too. If that weren’t enough to celebrate, this is my 700th post! |
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Excuse me for bridging such different novels, although both are about the challenge of connection, one looking to the future and the other to the past. In the first, translated from the French, a famous artist juggles the contradictions of Christian and Muslim cultures when he’s commissioned to design a bridge between two shores of a capital city. In the second, a teenage boy more comfortable in the virtual world than the human, ends up fighting for his life when he forges stronger connections between the hemispheres of his brain.
Amid my musings on identity, I’m fascinated by how religion shapes the someone we might become. Part of the legacy of a Catholic childhood is, for me, a curiosity about the social systems of irrationality, indoctrination and segregation, especially in their extreme forms. What attracts people to such institutions and how do they withdraw? Women Talking addresses the latter question; The Incendiaries the first.
I’ve recently relished two novels focusing on under-acknowledged women at points of political and ideological change. In the first, Mary Treat, a real-life scientist and correspondent of Charles Darwin, is seen through the eyes of Thatcher Greenwood, a fictional schoolmaster blocked from exposing his Christian pupils to evolutionary ideas. Unsheltered also includes a contemporary strand which all-too-recognisably depicts the casualties of a culture consuming its way to its own destruction. Old Baggage is set in a period between the two, when, ten years after (some) British women had won the vote, the heroism of those who fought for the franchise is largely forgotten in a battle between socialism and fascism for the minds of the youth.
October’s final novel pairing involves migration, mothers and sons, and a couple of anthropoid cats. In the first, reckless spending pushes a mother and her co-dependent son to leave Manhattan for Paris along with the family cat; in the second, a woman is forced to flee Kosovo for Finland, where her son grows up distant from family and roots until he begins an affair with a talking cat.
I’ve recently read two semi-autobiographical debuts about highly intelligent young women battling initially protective and subsequently persecutory alter egos to assert their real selves. The first set in Nigeria and the USA, the second in the UK, they provide fresh perspectives on the experience of mental disturbance from the inside.
Fictional writers can be tricky on the page; sometimes I suspect a character’s assigned the job because the author’s unfamiliar with more run-of-the-mill kinds of work. But, like anything else that’s slightly iffy, if you’re going to go for it, it’s best to go for it big time. That’s what Irish writer John Boyne does with his larger-than-life antihero Maurice Swift and American Andrew Sean Greer with “failed novelist” Arthur Less, both simultaneously managing to address the wider issues of human vanity and what constitutes a well-lived life.
Two novels with an unusual perspectives on mothers and mothering: the first an Indian dystopian novel about a woman’s rapid descent down the social scale after her husband and three-year-old daughter are taken from her; the second an English psychological thriller about a woman who never had, nor wanted, children who receives a Mother’s Day card in the post.
Two translated historical novels set at the beginning of the twentieth century about empires in decline. Through them, I’ve slightly narrowed the gap in my ignorance of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and whetted my appetite to learn more. Although it’s refreshing to take the focus away from the British Empire in fiction, I’d prefer to take a female perspective next time or, failing that, to zoom in on a key character right from the start. See what you think!
Two novels about British women working in a war zone: Kay as a journalist in Africa; Emma processing asylum applications in Iraq. Despite the dangers and deprivations, both felt invigorated by their work; something’s lost in marriage (plus children for Kay) and a move to the USA (temporarily for Kay with a summer rental; supposedly permanently for Emma and her soldier husband). Both novels capture the lure of extreme situations which, once savoured, set the women apart.
Two novels based on real-life deaths in the same decade of the mid-nineteenth century, deaths that were never completely explained. The first of a young woman in southern England, the second of dozens of pioneers heading for the American Wild West. The books’ female authors have perhaps taken different approaches to their source material. See what you think.
I might have mentioned before that I’m something of a traditionalist in my reading. Print suits me better than ebooks and, while I’ve enjoyed novels narrated on the radio, I don’t think I’ve ever chosen an audiobook in preference to text. Regarding the content, while I relish originality, novelty for its own sake can be a turnoff. Post-modernism gives me the shivers. So I was surprised to read three novels in as many months with footnotes. Is this a new trend?
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Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of two novels. 
My second novel published
May 2017.
My debut novel shortlisted for Polari First Book Prize
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I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on writing and my journey to publication and beyond. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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November 2018
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