Eurovision Reading: books set in European cities

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As that time of year is here again, I’ve put together some reading go with the ultimate musical event. Here’s a selection of books that are set in a major European city (or multiple ones) that I think provide a memorable snapshot of their setting in some way. They’re all either in English or read in an English translation—I welcome other people’s additions regardless of language.

  • The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (Gdańsk, formerly Danzig) – A combination of politics, magical realism, and a distinctive and unreliable narrator, The Tin Drum isn’t a story about a city, but its setting is important and very memorable when I think back on the novel.
  • Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (Paris) – Baldwin’s hugely famous novel about a man having an affair with a guy called Giovanni has a Parisian backdrop for the highs and lows of their time together and as the world outside the room in which they spend so much time together.
  • N-W by Zadie Smith (London) – The London conjured up by Smith in this novel is so real, a snapshot of particularly the north-west of the city as shown through four intertwined characters whose experienced are shaped by class, race, and opportunity.
  • ABBA ABBA by Anthony Burgess (Rome) – Perhaps an odd suggestion for a Rome novel (unlike Angels and Demons), but Burgess’ novel about Keats’ last days—part of which is a load of dirty sonnets—is both distinctive and does give a real feel of the city. Read alongside canto IV of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage for the full Romantics in Rome effect.
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (Prague) – Kundera’s novel about intertwined characters and their loves during the Prague Spring is both hugely quotable and moving and an interesting look at a political situation and a city.
  • A Guide To Berlin by Gail Jones (Berlin) – A novel about a group of strangers—all travellers who love Nabokov in some way—who meet weekly in Berlin to share stories and talk about the city, until a shocking event occurs that changes their meetings.
  • Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (Paris, Berlin, Vienna) – Get in many cities at once with Barnes’ short and punchy novel about Europe between the wars and how expression of sexuality, religion, and class was suddenly very different.

Confessions of a Reader #1: The Recommendation

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I love getting book recommendations, don’t get me wrong. A large amount of the books I actually buy are recommendations from friends, people whose book habits and preferences I know well and trust. Sending a ‘thanks for the suggestion, I loved the book’ message to someone is very satisfying, not to mention the all-important continuing the chain by recommending it to somebody else (this is how everyone seems to read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, after being told ‘it’s devastating but it’s so good’).

The problem is, sometimes people will not stop recommending you something you do not want to read. A genre you don’t like or a book you gave up on the first page of. Something with an insufferable first-person narrator. A book the time for reading has really passed (can you tell which specific book that I have actually read those last two are referring to?). It happens for other media types too, especially whatever TV series is big at that moment, and can leave you unnecessarily hating certain things that otherwise should just pass by you with ease.

For me, it tends to be fantasy or sci-fi books, because my tastes in those are very specific, especially the former. My Lord of the Rings exposure is having half-heartedly read The Fellowship of the Ring years ago and having owned The Hobbit as a child and never getting more than a few pages into it, despite liking the dragon on the cover. I don’t have any interest in it. I only like fantasy if it is a) Harry Potter b) modern/urban fantasy close to magical realism or c) very close to horror and probably either modern or like a historical novel but with the Unseelie Court or something. I share my undergraduate tutor’s hatred of Tolkien, though hers was more to do with his reputation as a tutor and his academic work. Mine is because I’ve had years of being told I would like his work, but I don’t.

I know from ranting about this with friends that I am not alone in this problem. I think that ranting with like-minded people might be the answer to this one, seeing as saying ‘X is not for me’ to somebody recommending it can sometimes just result in them trying harder to convince you. Often I feel like I have a club with anyone who also dislikes Lord of the Rings, or other things that are often recommended but not for me, one based on the exciting exchange ‘I don’t actually like…’ ‘oh my god, me neither!’. To anyone fed up of the same old recommendations of things they know aren’t for them, I say: come chat to me. We can rant together.

None of the Above

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None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio

None of the Above is a powerful and compelling YA novel about a girl who discovers she is intersex aged eighteen. Kristin is a hurdler with a college scholarship and a popular boyfriend who finds out that her chromosomes aren’t what she assumed. She has to deal with her identity in the wake of this discovery and then when the whole school finds out she is intersex. The novel is an uplifting story about identity, learning who you and others are, and finding out who is really there for you.

Gregorio has written a novel that will make many people think, with many characters taking similar journeys of learning to understand different people and how some things—like gender—are far more complex than some people may imagine. Most of this is through the experiences of Kristin and through her and other people learning about being intersex, but there are also moments of discussion about things like homophobia and transphobia which focus on characters learning to be better towards others and to set aside assumptions and prejudices. Kristin herself is likable and interesting, somebody who isn’t even sure how to begin dealing with her own identity and her existence in relation to other people. The teenage characters are pretty typical of a YA novel, with various interests and dreams relating to school and college, which is important in a novel that tries to show how crucial acceptance is in a normal, everyday context.

None of the Above is an important book, taking an identity issue and makes it part of a YA narrative that is similar to many teenagers—dealing with who you are alongside possible mental health issues and life drama. It is similar to books like If I Was Your Girl, particularly in showing both the great and terrible sides to high schoolers and their ability to accept or ostracize.

I’ll Eat When I’m Dead by Barbara Bourland

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Death, drugs, and betrayal in the fashion world: I’ll Eat When I’m Dead by Barbara Bourland

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I’ll Eat When I’m Dead is a tense and exhilarating satire of the fashion world with a mysterious death at its heart. When Hillary, a top editor from RAGE Fashion Book, is found dead in the office, it seems like she starved, though her friend Cat thinks there’s more to the story. She starts doing her own detective work based on a mysterious bottle found in a bag of Hillary’s and soon she is drawn into a world of drugs, lies, and danger, all whilst dealing with the glaring public eye on social media.

In content, Bourland’s novel is Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney for the digital age, where staying at the top requires hard work, luck, and sometimes killer instincts. In style it is far more straightforward and less pretentious than either, satiric and full of detail but still tensely written. The characters often seem to be teetering on the edge, fuelling themselves on whatever works to get them through the cutthroat world of the fashion magazine business in an age where digital media is key and paying people to wear brands on ‘Photogram’ – a transparent stand-in – is more effective than a full page ad. This environment is vividly drawn and brutal, a female-dominated version of the world of novels like American Psycho, and it forms the crucial backdrop for the fairly simple mystery death narrative.

The real force of the novel is Bourland’s satire of the industry and of other elements of the digital age. Offhand comments about dieting and image make for dark and at times horrific moments of self-awareness, summed up in the novel’s title. I’ll Eat When I’m Dead is the female-led modern version of 80s and 90s alternative American satirical fiction, exposing darkness in an industry full of drugs, sex, and battles for the top.

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‘But don’t forget the songs that made you cry, and the songs that saved your life’; Regardless of Morrissey’s fears, it is pretty difficult to forget the songs that have been monumental in your life. It’s the reason that wedding songs are so important and why those pop punk tracks you loved aged thirteen are still waiting, word-perfect, in your brain for the next throwback playlist. And when those songs are the ones that kept you putting one foot in front of the other, forced you out of bed and stumbling down the road towards public transport, they become particularly significant.

“’The most impassionate song to a lonely soul’: Music, Cities, & Twentysomething Isolation“, Siobhan Dunlop for Shakespeare and Punk

(via shakespeareandpunk)

Just something I wrote for Shakespeare and Punk about music, cities, loneliness, and Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City

Quick book picks for May

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A new month means a whole new bunch of books coming out (probably more books than sun coming out, at least in the UK). To help you choose what to read, here are some of my favourites coming out this month, with quick summaries and links to reviews.

  • Little Gold by Allie Rogers – A moving and life-affirming tale of growing up different in Brighton in the 1980s.
  • House of Names by Colm Toíbín – A retelling of the House of Agamemnon in modern prose, with tense character relationships and intense revenge.
  • Girlhood by Cat Clarke – A fantastically tense YA novel about friendship and grief in a Scottish boarding school, with a gripping and funny narrative.
  • New Boy by Tracy Chevalier – The next in the Hogarth Shakespeare series is an unforgettable retelling of Othello in a single day in a Washington schoolyard.
  • Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallet – A time-spanning novel about changes and connections, set mostly in the grounds of an old house after the Restoration and during the Cold War.
  • The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi – A darkly comic and characteristic new novella from Hanif Kureishi, trapped in the head of an increasingly bed-bound aging filmmaker.
  • Man Alive by Thomas Page McBee – A powerful memoir of a trans man dealing with ideas of masculinity in the wake of violence.
  • I’ll Eat When I’m Dead by Barbara Bourland – The female-led modern version of 80s and 90s alternative American satirical fiction like American Psycho, exposing darkness in an industry full of drugs, sex, and battles for the top (review coming soon).
  • The Finding of Martha Lost by Caroline Wallace – An enchanting story about a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in Liverpool Lime Street station and has never known where she truly comes from.

The Genius of Jane Austen by Paula Byrne

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The Genius of Jane Austen: Jane Austen, The Theatre, and Why Hollywood Loves Her by Paula Byrne

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The Genius of Jane Austen is a fascinating book about Jane Austen’s connection to and interest in the theatre and how her reworking of comedic drama and farce in her novels is comparable to the reworking of her novels into film and television in the modern day. The majority of the book is part biographical and historical account of Austen’s theatrical interest and part close reading of her works in relation to major drama and other comedic work of her time. This is a reissue of Byrne’s earlier book Jane Austen and the Theatre in time for the bicentenary of Austen’s death this year, but with a new look at Austen in Hollywood and on TV to close the book.

From the introduction, Byrne sets out to show the importance of specifically English stage comedy to Austen’s work, but also to the influence of drama in her life and her novels. The first section focuses on Austen’s experience of the theatre, giving details about private performances and about professional theatre at the time. It is an interesting introduction to the theatre of the period through the lens of a famous novelist. References to other works bring in a sense of the literary scene of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, from how Northanger Abbey uses theatre references to parody Burney’s Evelina to pointing out that Austen saw (and greatly enjoyed) the pantomime of Don Juan that Byron famously mentions at the start of his poem.

The second part of the book is about the theatre and Austen’s novels, with a straightforward structure of chapters focusing on certain novels and then interrogating both theatrical sources and theatrical techniques within these works. Casual fans of Austen and students working on certain texts may skim past to their favourite novels, but as a whole it provides an illuminating if rather detailed explanation of many interesting elements of Austen’s novels and how they relate to other texts and to dramatic conventions and stock figures.

The final chapter—the one which allows the word ‘Hollywood’ to be so prominent in the book—is possibly its most enticing part, a fairly critical look at Austen adaptations that argues that the best adaptations actively ‘adapt’ Austen, keeping the spirit of her comedy, but making it work in a different format. Byrne highlights key flaws in many Austen adaptations and gives an extended discussion of the film Clueless and how it adapts Emma more successfully than most straight adaptations of Emma that is fascinating to read. At the end, this seemingly unrelated chapter is brought together by comparing these less traditional adaptations of Austen with her own transformations of dramatic comedy of the eighteenth century, albeit briefly.

Byrne’s book is a great read for Austen fans, with enough depth and footnotes for further information, but without being an unapproachable book of literary criticism. Instead, it serves as an illuminating account of the early nineteenth-century theatre, an interesting take on various parts of Austen’s novels, and a ‘state of the nation’ type look at film and TV adaptations up to the present day. Even those with more of an interest in the general period and its literature than Austen in particular can find good material from the first section in particular, and the final chapter has interesting points that can be related to other overly adapted writers as well, such as Shakespeare who Byrne compares Austen to from the start.

All The Good Things by Clare Fisher

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All The Good Things by Clare Fisher

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All The Good Things is a well-written and heartbreaking novel about a young woman, Beth, who is in prison and encouraged by her therapist to write down whatever good things she can think of. Though this list and each explanation, her story emerges: how her life lead to the incident which ended up with her in prison. It is a gripping and moving book which shows how there are different sides to the story, even your own story.

The structure of the book means that events are told episodically in roughly chronological order, but with enough references early on to work out in broad strokes what has happened to Beth. As the narrative reaches these events, it becomes clear that her story is about how bad things can keep leading to more bad things, even though good things happen on a smaller scale. The novel is not particularly sensationalist despite the subject matter, but instead gives Beth real and human problems such as the way in which trauma and mental health issues affect all aspects of her life, from relationships to getting trapped in payday loans. Her narrative draws to a climax both in the story she is telling of her past and her present in the prison, as it becomes clear that she has never really been given the help she has needed.

Fisher paints a vivid and moving picture of how a person can be let down both by people and by the system, creating both a gripping novel and a stark reminder of the human cost of cuts to services for children, vulnerable people, and prisons. It is definitely one of my top books of the year so far.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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Sometimes fine isn’t enough: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a heartbreaking and powerful novel that is difficult to put down, drawing the reader into the life of the main character. Eleanor lives by a simple routine, eating the same meal every day, wearing the same clothes to work, drinking the same vodka to help her forget. She lives within her carefully arranged boundaries in order to survive. However, a series of small events make her change this routine and try to understand a world she has purposefully been avoiding whilst remembering the darkness in her past that she had been protecting herself from.

Honeyman’s debut novel is about a character with a very distinctive worldview, built up as a coping mechanism, and how terrifying change can be when it upsets such mechanisms. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear not only how horrible elements of Eleanor’s past have been, but how much she has repressed to enable her to get through each day, at the expense of human connections and the unpredictability of life. It does not represent every experience of trauma and mental health because it is just one story, but what is important is that Eleanor discovers she is allowed happiness and the book celebrates how other people can be better than expected whilst not undermining the terrible things that have occurred.

Through an immersive first-person narrative, Honeyman creates a novel that draws in the reader, both dark and touching, with a message of finding human connections—in whatever shape or form—even when you’ve given up on them. The epigraph is from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and this is very pertinent: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine takes Laing’s look at loneliness amongst people and shows how the intersection between loneliness and mental health can be very difficult, but also that friendships and connections can be formed that can save a person’s life.

House of Names by Colm Tóibín

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Greek tragedy rewritten: House of Names by Colm Tóibín

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House of Names is a novel about revenge written with masterful and haunting prose. It tells the story of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife left behind after he has sacrificed their daughter and sailed off to the Trojan War, and how her thirst for revenge impacts her and her children, plus those around them. This tragic story of family killing family is also a detailed look at individuals waiting for revenge and hoping that it will bring catharsis.

Tóibín uses names and narratives from Greek mythology and dramatic tragedy by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes, but uses modern language and new characters and events to provide a very fresh take on this ancient material. The cursed House of Atreus is here for those who know classical material, but at the same time, the novel works well for those unfamiliar with the other material, a gripping novel about murder and revenge. Reflections upon the gods and the loss and change of systems of belief is another major element to the book which gives it a modern feel, showing how revenge can substitute for belief when it seems as if one’s belief system has failed.

The style of House of Names, particularly in the sections from Clytemnestra’s point of view, are its particular strength, capturing an ancient feel of revenge alongside her personal emotions. Tóibín’s novel is a fantastic reworking of myth and tragedy into a thrilling and enjoyable read.