Category: Illness

Keeping going: The Life of the Mind & The Retreat

12/11/2021

I was going to call this post hopes dashed, but that would be too sensational for these two lovely novels about women getting on with it after disappointment, not because they’re heroic survivors but because they’re ordinary flawed human beings. In the first, an untenured academic carries on as normal despite a drawn-out miscarriage; in the second, an aspiring artist continues painting despite a lack of talent and community support. Both stories unfold in elegant understated prose with touches of humour.

10 Comments

War is over, but the trauma endures: Winter Flowers & Transparent City

17/9/2021

6 Comments

Allow me to introduce you to two translated novels, set on different continents a century apart, in the aftermath of wars that, for some, will never end. The first is set in contemporary Angola, a country rich in minerals but economically poor, hampered by twenty-five years of civil war; the second takes place in France, at the end of the First World War, a war which will continue to impact on the members of one small family for the rest of their lives.

6 Comments

Science, bias and belief: The Atomics & Hurdy Gurdy

11/9/2021

8 Comments

I’m struck by the similarities between these two novels, despite being of different genres and set six centuries apart. Both are about men who take pride in their knowledge and intellect yet are blind to the biases that limit their understanding, particularly in relation to women and to physical health. The first is about a nuclear physicist dosing himself with radiation, the second about a young monk’s encounter with the Black Death.

8 Comments

Elder care: Red Crosses, As We Are Now, The Girls from Alexandria & At the Jerusalem

4/8/2021

4 Comments

Let me tell you about these four novels featuring older women looking back at their lives, and forward, some with dread, to what’s left of it. The first is a translated novel set in Belarus. The second and fourth are set in care homes around the middle of the twentieth century. The third is a contemporary novel set in a London hospital with flashbacks to a glittery Alexandria. All illustrate the vulnerability of old age, but also the strength and spirit of the central characters.

4 Comments

Love and loss: Empire of Wild, The Exile and the Mapmaker & Suiza

12/7/2021

10 Comments

Three short reviews of novels on the theme of love and loss: the first, set in Canada, about a woman whose husband disappears and turns up a year later with a new identity; the second, set in France, is about a man who yearns to be reunited with the lover from his youth before he loses himself to dementia; the third, a translated novel set in Spain, is about the tender relationship that develops between two brutalised people.

10 Comments

Women’s historical oppression: The Pull of the Stars & The Spinning House Affair

5/6/2021

10 Comments

These two historical novels, set near the dawn of the twentieth century, illustrate how appallingly women’s freedoms, even – or especially – over custody of their own bodies, have been controlled by men. Both stories take place in or around institutions: the first an Irish hospital battling the pandemic; the second a university battling the ordinary citizens of an English town.

10 Comments

Interiority: The Performance & Nervous System

17/4/2021

8 Comments

Let’s consider two novels published this month which direct the reader’s gaze towards the characters’ inner lives, mentally and physically. The first, set in Australia during the recent rampaging bushfires, focuses on the characters’ wandering minds as they watch a play. The second, set in the Americas, looks in on the body and outwards to the stars.

8 Comments

Wanderers: Salina & The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

26/3/2021

8 Comments

Salina roams aimlessly through the desert, sequentially accompanied by each of her three sons. Harold is physically and mentally unprepared for his epic journey, although he does have a specific destination in sight. Salina’s story unfolds in a newly-published novella, translated from the French; Harold’s in a deceptively light bestseller, published in 2012.

8 Comments

Modern Classics set on hospital wards: Memento Mori & One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

6/3/2021

14 Comments

Here we have two highly successful mid-twentieth century novels with hospital settings. The first is a comedy of manners only partly set on a medical ward for older women in a London hospital; the second is an exuberant but ultimately devastating portrayal of an Oregon State medical hospital. What’s it like to read/reread them during pandemic six decades after they first hit the shelves?

14 Comments

A woman of substance: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

19/2/2021

4 Comments

Claudia Hampton is writing a history of the world, and of herself, but only in her head. Lying in a hospital bed, she is visited by memories of a rich and vivid life, beginning with scrambling up a cliff on a Dorset beach as a child in 1920. Narcissistic to the core, she seems to prefer her dreams to the flesh-and-blood characters who sit intermittently at her bedside: her daughter, Lisa; Jasper, her former partner and Lisa’s father; Laszlo, her semi-adopted Hungarian son. But the only two people she’s ever loved are dead: her brother, Gordon, and Tom, the soldier she met when she was a journalist in Cairo during the Second World War.

4 Comments

Families under pressure: Kololo Hill & The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

18/2/2021

4 Comments

Both these recent reads have complex family dynamics at the centre, while addressing wider political issues in very different ways. In the first, we follow a middle-class Asian family forced to migrate from Uganda to Britain on the whim of a tin-pot dictator; in the second, three siblings re-enact their childhood rivalries around their mother’s deathbed as bushfires envelop their country and the world colludes in its own extinction.

4 Comments

Losing it: Ten Days & Gratitude

31/1/2021

2 Comments

Wolf has lost his wife and, if he doesn’t get his act together, he might lose his daughter, at exactly the moment he needs her most. Michka is losing her words, but is desperate to use those remaining to express her gratitude to a couple she lost touch with in childhood, even though they saved her life. Although I’ve posted a few reviews already this year, these are the first of fiction published in 2021.

2 Comments

Polish your words for a special flash fiction challenge!

27/1/2021

2 Comments

When I began blogging in 2013, I was anxious about trolls. I needn't have worried: Annecdotal is well below their radar and, in my experience, the blogosphere has been a welcoming and supportive place. Numerous bloggers have hosted my promo posts, including Sue Vincent. Now I have an opportunity to return the favour.

I knew Sue had responsibilities as a carer for her disabled son. What I didn't know, until a couple of days ago, was that in these tough times for all of us, Sue's circumstances have taken a nosedive. The blogging community has stepped up to help.

One strand is a fund-raising flash fiction contest that kicks off next Monday. This post is part of the prelude which I'll let the anonymous ringleader tell you about in her own words:

2 Comments

Memorial Memoirs: Absolutely Delicious & Apprenticed to My Mother

7/12/2020

7 Comments

I’ve recently read these two memoirs which celebrate the fortitude of the authors’ mothers, especially in later life. Both stories are precipitated by a death: in the case of Alison Jean Lester’s memoir, it’s her mother’s confrontation with terminal cancer; for Geoff Le Pard, it’s the revelation of a new side of his mother’s character on becoming a widow. Both are touching tributes, peppered with poetry and humour.

7 Comments

Connections: The Sweet Indifference of the World & The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die & Coming up for Air

13/7/2020

8 Comments

Mmm, seems I’ve chosen books with long titles for this threesome! But the reason I couldn’t bear to choose a couple and leave the other on the sidelines awaiting a partner is that they are all about characters connecting in unconventional ways. Firstly, I review a novella in translation about a writer meeting a man who seems to be a younger version of himself. In a second translated novella, a woman ensures that more than her memory lives on after her death. In the third, a literary novel, two women are linked via an invention that a third character plays an active part in developing.

8 Comments

How would you answer the covid novel’s call?

28/6/2020

8 Comments

History can’t have got the memo. The virus destined to put the world on pause has had us glued to the news: first with the exposure of right-wing government incompetence, then with the spotlight on racism we can no longer ignore. Whether this depresses or delights us, it’s hard to keep up. What’s the role of the writer – particularly writers like me with a tiny readership – in historic times? Should novelists switch to facts from fiction? Should we try to shape historic discourse or step back and observe?

8 Comments

Lockdown dis-easing and risk assessment, personal and political

5/6/2020

6 Comments

Arrive late, leave early! Excellent advice for fiction writers pruning the unnecessaries from our scenes. Equally useful for introverts who quickly tire of socialising. But for a public health initiative in a pandemic? The UK is showing the world how not to do lockdown, introducing it too late and loosening the restrictions too early. Could it be that the occupant of number 10, having achieved his ambition of becoming prime minister has been using his undoubted spare time to brush up his skills in creative writing? Could it be that covid-brain has mangled his already

muddled pathways so that he’s imposed a strategy for achieving his next unlikely ambition – if a man of his talents can “lead” first a capital city, then a country, why not go for the Booker Prize? – upon the one of which he’s tired?

6 Comments

Sleep, insomnia and mental health in contemporary fiction

3/5/2020

5 Comments

Early this year, I was prescribed a course of antibiotics. While I’m grateful to live in a time and place where such things are available, this medication did not like me. Not only did they leave a nasty taste in my mouth, they disturbed my sleep to the extent of fleetingly fragmenting my mind in a manner akin to psychosis. So I don’t need convincing of the importance of getting sufficient sleep to our psychological (and physical) well-being; but we can also get too hung up on sleep such that the associated anxiety can be almost as damaging as not sleeping. I drafted this post back in February when I saw that sleep was the theme of this year’s mental health awareness week; although that's now changed to kindness, with many suffering insomnia in lockdown, this post on sleep in my own reading and writing still seems worth sharing.

5 Comments

I’m fuming (furious, irate, incensed, enraged, seething, mad, livid, cross)

17/4/2020

13 Comments

Life’s changed so quickly, it’s been hard to keep track. I’ll admit my initial response was childishly self-centred. Woe is me, my favourite conference is cancelled; I won’t be able to give my talk and sell half a dozen more books. But, soon after, I saw the point when large gatherings were banned (although it was a shame my Wednesday afternoon choir couldn’t do its final concert). Next came concern for the mental well-being of those whose lives were restricted and livelihoods lost.

I felt grief when schools and pubs and restaurants were closed, despite not having much use for any of them; and guilt when a minor health issue kept me from my usual outdoor volunteering, with staffing already low as the over 70s were advised to stay at home. I welcomed the lockdown in bringing some order to an atmosphere of chaos and confusion, despite being appalled when I saw it happening to my publisher in Spain. I found a host of silver linings and even admired the most egotistical prime minister and the most extreme right wing government’s management of the crisis. And then the doctors and nurses began to die.

13 Comments

Do you read differently in anxious times?

29/3/2020

8 Comments

As I said earlier this month, in a more optimistic – or head-in-the-sand mentality – there are good things about the coronavirus pandemic, an obvious one to this blog’s readers being more time to read. On the other hand, while we might find unexpected gaps in our schedules, anxiety consumes vast quantities of headspace, reducing our capacity for, on some days, anything more taxing than watching cat videos and repurposing unloved paperbacks as toilet tissue. So I’ve been wondering whether I, you, or anyone else, reads differently in times of high anxiety. What do you think?

8 Comments

Silver linings: 9 good things about the coronavirus pandemic

20/3/2020

14 Comments

These are strange times, scary times, depressing times. If the virus doesn’t get us physically, we’ll be hurt psychologically through anxiety, grief for lost loved ones and the claustrophobia of social isolation. It will harm us economically and socially too. But there are silver linings and, although they might not balance the negatives, these potential benefits are real.

14 Comments

History with meddlesome jinns and fairies: The Ninth Child & The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

29/2/2020

2 Comments

My two final reviews for February are of historical novels with touches of culturally-appropriate magic realism. They also feature the losses and gains of relocating from a major city to a rural area in a period of rapid social change. The first is about public health and engineering in nineteenth century Scotland; the second is set between the late twentieth century and the present in post-revolutionary Iran.

2 Comments

How our minds work: Tyll & Human Traces

19/1/2020

10 Comments

Although these two historical novels are very different, both sparked some deep reflection about the workings of the human mind, and especially how our reasoning and problem-solving is influenced by beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, are shaped by the times and cultures in which we live. Both are set primarily in mainland Europe – the first in the seventeenth century and the second towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth – and feature – predominantly in the first and latterly in the second – countries ravaged by war.

10 Comments

Intergenerational dependence: Akin & The Last Children of Tokyo

10/12/2019

0 Comments

In both these novels, the first set in contemporary New York and Nice and the second in a hypothetical future Tokyo, an older man is looking after a young relative in less than ideal circumstances. In different ways, they illustrate generational interdependence and how the past actions, or inactions, of the older generation have brought about some of the difficulties experienced by the young.

0 Comments

The Black Death: Nobber & To Calais in Ordinary Time

26/11/2019

2 Comments

If I’ve reviewed any other novels set during the Black Death that swept across Europe in 1348, I’ve forgotten them. These two, published in the UK this summer, are likely to stay in my mind for some time. The first set in Ireland, the second in southern England, they’re very different, although both original in their language and style. And disturbingly topical as we’re catapulted towards an apocalypse – both politically and climatically – of our own.