Review 31's Books of the Year 2024
by Review 31
Jamie McKendrick, Drypoint (Faber)
The poet and translator Jamie McKendrick's eighth original collection, Drypoint, covers a lot of ground. At the outset, St Jerome fades into earshot, muttering furiously about the scribal dog's life he has landed himself with: 'Translating anything is bad enough / but try the Word of God, try wading through / pages of genealogy and petty-minded laws'. The Magi pass through, with their respective gifts, Balthazar's myrrh scenting the pages until it passes into the hands of a Smyrna merchant out of The Waste Land.
These poems are not quite sequences as such, but exploratory hoverings around themes that overlap, as though one poem, one angle, one historical view, has not exhausted them. A piece in the first section, 'Order Coleoptera, Genus Coccinella', introduces the ladybird in a perversely monochrome etching from an old textbook, staring down from the wall above the desk 'with blazing dark, with a tinge of opprobrium'. What is a ladybird's opprobrium?, we might wonder. In the third and final section, they return, now an infestation, clogging the bathroom window-frame at an unseasonal early October.
In the central section, 'Far and Near', McKendrick's considerable skills as a translator from Italian are put to work, not just for the 20th-century work of Giorgio Bassani and Giuseppe Ungaretti, but for the classics too — Dante, Cavalcanti, Michelangelo. These are beautiful renditions, convincingly articulate and possessed of great delicacy of touch.
McKendrick's own work is finely poised between lyric contemplation and a salty philosophising that wears its sceptical intelligence lightly. It is rarely without an implicit, and distinctly unfashionable, metrical pulse that emerges subtly when the poems are read aloud. Nor is the mood necessarily saturnine. 'Various Vices' updates the seven deadly sins to include the pedantic fault-finding by which one ensures Chastity: 'a mole, a mark, a turn of phrase or maybe / a high regard for Salvador Dali, / tolerance of Instapoetry'. Tellingly for a Liverpool-born poet, a handful of ironic haiku seems to have its roots in the Mersey Sound of blessed memory. Here is the whole of 'trigger warning': 'Report this poem / for its lack of empathy, / its relentless gloom.’
We will need every ounce of such untrivial good-humouredness in the times ahead.
Stuart Walton
Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape)
I’ve selected Creation Lake as my favorite book of 2024, knowing it will be a controversial and polarizing choice. Praised and panned in equal measure upon its release this past September, Creation Lake follows ‘Sadie Smith’ — not her real name — an American agent provocateur who infiltrates an anarcho-primitivist commune in southwestern France. ‘Sadie’s’ story is weaved with that of cave-dwelling French philosopher Bruno Lacombe, the group’s ideological North Star who communicates with his followers through emails in which he expounds on the virtues of the caring and sensitive Neanderthals, contrasting them with the violent and selfish homo sapiens. According to Bruno, the Neanderthals were the superior human race, and one homo sapiens would do well to imitate as opposed to belittle.
Creation Lake is less the ‘noir thriller’ its marketing team has seemingly pitched it as and more an examination of humanity’s evolution — physical, technological, ideological, and moral — over millennia. It is also, in my opinion, a synthesis of the very best of Kushner’s fiction. Creation Lake feels like something Kushner has been building towards throughout her career, continuity rather than divergence. There is an echo of Telex From Cuba’s sociological insight into the glamorous yet fragile world of the powerful and privileged, a clever, inverse variation on the American ingénue abroad protagonist of The Flamethrowers, and a similar but far more refined critique of the American criminal justice system and surveillance state found in The Mars Room.
Some critics of Creation Lake point to the cynicism of its protagonist, attributing it to Kushner herself, as well as to the novel’s lack of any proposed practical alternative to the existing order of things (Bruno’s Neanderthal-based world remains an unattainable fantasy) as evidence of moral and narrative flaws in a novel that should, in theory, be a scathing indictment of all the evils of the current world. But I would argue that Creation Lake is an indictment, though in its own subtle way. Setting aside the obvious fact that Kushner and “Sadie Smith” are not one in the same, the position the novel — as opposed to its narrator — takes is clear and unambiguous for anyone remotely familiar with Kushner’s oeuvre. Instead of proposing solutions, Creation Lake asks us to simply stop and question the world that homo sapiens made and our position in it.
Bronwyn Scott-McCharen
Ariane Koch, trans. Damion Searls, Overstaying (Pushkin Press)
Ariane Koch’s slight and brittle debut novel Overstaying is narrated by a misanthrope living in a small mountain town she has never left, spending afternoons drinking beer in the town’s Roundel Bar. The narrator presides over and inhabits a ten-room house left to her by her parents but fears her siblings and their offspring will come and reclaim it. One day, however, the narrator comes upon a figure hitherto referred to as “the visitor”, taking him in and allowing him a spare room in her house.
Koch eschews progressively teasing out the vexation the narrator suffers once the visitor moves in — and with that, a more conventional narrative arc — opting instead to compose a novel out of caustic vignettes. From the moment the visitor arrives, the narrator oscillates wildly between wanting to control him and throw him out of the house, offering musings on her relationship to her home, the town, and the visitor, through recursive fragments.
Voice and an uncanny use of language take precedence in these riffs; the absurdist and reclusive tenor of the narrator’s vernacular, translated from the original Swiss-German to curious effect by Searls, allow the reader to reflect on ownership, possession, foreignness and hospitality in strange and often uncomfortable ways. But Overstaying also positions itself to be read as an allegorical text on immigration, a long-standing point of political contention in Swiss society. Since 2015, the right-wing party Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party) have gained steady ground in federal elections, leveraging anti-immigration rhetoric to secure around twenty-nine per cent of the vote in the October 2023 elections.
The novel’s references to contemporary immigration are sometimes rather overt, and so, when read allegorically, its characters and setting are not its innovative symbols, feeling like quite literal (if somewhat abstracted) translations of the dynamics between conservative-minded ‘native’ hosts and migrants in Western states. The novel’s most effective symbol is instead a method — its deployment of language — the narrator’s frequent absurdist semantic constructions becoming symbols for rhetoric or, more specifically, the linguistic gymnastics a voice performs to create statements about an ‘other.’
Huda Awan
Sarah Manguso, Liars (Picador)
Sarah Manguso's Liars might well be read as a companion piece to Miranda July's much-touted 2024 novel, All Fours. Both follow American women artists in their 40s breaking away from dead marriages and the trials of motherhood into incarnations that approximate their real selves. While July's story is playful, absurd, occasionally profound, Manguso's is by turns scabrous, tender, bitter and in every sense a more realistic picture of emancipation from a constricting family life.
Previously the author of a book of aphorisms and various works of auto-fiction, Manguso gives us a protagonist who is an unapologetic portrait of herself. When Jane marries handsome, self-satisfied filmmaker and visual artist John Bridges she discovers she can be both creatively and romantically satisfied. But the cracks in their relationship start appearing almost immediately after the birth of their only child. As Jane's writing and teaching career supersedes John's efforts at becoming a director, he begins a series of risky start-ups, forcing them to move multiple times. But he's innately lazy, critical of her work and eventually adulterous. While John travels constantly, managing the house falls entirely to Jane: ‘I teach part-time and spend my days trying to fit ten pounds of shit into the proverbial five-pound bag. I long for a bigger bag or less shit.’
Yet, as toxic and tortuous as their marriage becomes, Manguso is fearless in teasing out its contradictions. Desperate to keep the family together, though not at the cost of her career, Jane tells herself: 'I'd had a great partner, a good pregnancy, a great kid - I barely knew anyone else with such luck. It wasn't all lies'. When she beats cancer John briefly becomes an ideal supportive husband. But the centre cannot hold and a vicious divorce beckons, leaving Jane to reflect: 'Romance is nothing but a cheap craft-store decoration made to sanitize a desire to fuck. . . Is that what my marriage was for?’
Written in short paragraphs separated by plenty of white space — a now-ubiquitous narrative method popularised by Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation — Liars for once justifies this vogueish form by its searing content. Manguos's novel carpet bombs the reader with brief, painful, unforgettable scenes from a marriage that are simultaneously claustrophobic and freeing in their relentless honesty.
Jude Cook
Su Tong, trans. Honey Watson, Midnight Stories (Sinoist Books)
One of the sorrowful mysteries of the publishing industry is its staunch indifference to the vibrant literature bursting out of China. Su Tong has plenty of success behind him — not least having a major film based on his novel, Raise the Red Lantern — but his recent work, such as Shadow of the Hunter, did not get the recognition it deserved. These days, the bland appeal of Japanese cats and cherry blossoms is preferred to the coarse vitality of the Chinese peasant village.
His new collection, Midnight Stories — in spirited translation by Honey Watson — is set of linked tales situated around the fictional Toon Street, a low-key peasant neighbourhood. These are finely balanced episodes of comedy and drama: a child buries his grandfather alive while he waits for the mythical white crane of death; a rift between schoolgirls over body odour sunders their friendship; a spoilt manchild commits a knife murder on a watermelon boat. The characters are uneducated yet wily. Scores are settled on impulse. Wisdom abounds as a mix of horse sense and fatalism.
Refreshingly for a contemporary story collection, there are no ephemeral mood pieces, no stretch marks of the writing workshop, no endings that groan into view, booby-trapped with literary devices. Instead these are petri dishes of human nature, where flawed unglamourous individuals cameo in their own community folklore.
Seasoned with clever details, wry asides and entertaining bit parts, Midnight Stories has an earthy appeal that disguises its underlying sophistication.
Rónán Hession
Yoko Tawada, trans. Susan Bernofsky , Paul Celan and the Transtibetan Angel (New Directions; Dialogue Books)
I first fell in love with Yoko Tawada when Danish food culture (hotdogs) was pilloried on the second page of Scattered All over the Earth as a strangely elegant segue into contending with imperialist thought. Nanook, an Inuit from Greenland, is mistaken for a refugee ‘from the land of sushi’, a country that has sunk into the sea. Meanwhile, Knut wonders if Denmark doesn’t count too as a country that no longer exists — since it no longer comprises Greenland, is no longer the Kingdom of Denmark, but merely a lonely, tiny plot of land, ‘couldn’t you say I’m the second generation of people who lost their country?’
In Paul Celan and the Transtibetan Angel, Tawada continues her scathing and hilarious observations of all kinds of dislocation. While seeing Celan’s name in the title of a novel might seem as promising as a filmatisation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s life (not at all), with Tawada it did instantly intrigue me — the novel was somehow already funny, placing itself delightfully aslant. And true enough, while encircling notions of trauma both collective and private, obliquely and point-blank, what is so irresistible about this book is how it manages to pay homage to the great poet in the most Tawadian of ways: with a sense of feather-like profundity and playful invention. The book is of course not about Paul Celan per se, but seeks out kinship through shared concerns both linguistic and existential. Celan, like Tawada, wrote in several languages, and in that liminality, across different periods and political contexts, they gracefully press into the sore subject of language used as a weapon of nation-state essentialism.
Patrik is, or was, a researcher at the Institute of World Literature in Berlin. Recently ditched by his girlfriend, semi-bedridden and wholly loopy, he is consumed with Celan’s poetry to the point of existing through it. He is supposed to give a paper on Threadsuns in Paris but is stifled by the registration form. What is his nationality?
Patrik replies FRG, then regrets using the abbreviation. It’s cowardly to speak only in capital letters. I’m an R.A. from the I.F.W.L.B. and am traveling to the I.P.C.C. with A.F.: would that be an exemplary response? My sense of self-worth isn’t elevated enough to let me speak in lower-case letters. Capital letters do offer some protection.
His spirits lift when he meets an angel of sorts in a café, Leo-Eric Fu. Less important than whether Leo-Eric is real or imagined is that he brings into Patrik’s field of vision a medical reference book that Celan annotated and used in his search of a new language. And isn’t that the ideal path into a new year – spending time with the people, the writers — the angels — who enliven our greatest hopes and deepest obsessions?
Denise Rose Hansen
Andrzej Tichý, trans. Nichola Smalley, Purity (And Other Stories)
Andrzej Tichý’s Purity is billed as fiction, but the strength of these stories is not in the author’s ability to make stuff up. After all, facts are all we have: numerous facts and various ways to relate them. The facts offered here are no doubt familiar to many. ‘Sometimes the thing that appears just is really unjust, and vice versa.’ ‘[H]umanity is so impoverished and blinkered, when nature is so rich in perspective’. ‘Everyone’s names have been changed.’ ‘There are no humans, only animals.’ ‘2020 was a good year. As sharp and heavy as an axe.’ When Tichý — who writes in Swedish and has found a skilful and inventive translator in Nichola Smalley — tells us these things, it becomes hard to ignore them. Poverty, inequality, life reduced to meaningless existence come out more perceptible in this book than they usually do in the news.
The title story, taking up a third of the collection, is a collage of set pieces whose protagonists are cleaners: people who eliminate what others don’t wish to see, smell or touch – bodily fluids, body parts and more – day in day out, for little money and with little prospect of change. Their lives, just like ours, are made of ups and downs. Everything oscillates between anger, violence, aimlessness, desire, addiction, despair and hope. There is no need to invent these things: they are all around us, and if they must be turned into fiction to get through to us, then fiction it is.
Here are two more facts: ‘They that have shall have more. They that don’t have shall get fucked.’ Most of us have come across these facts: on the page and on the screen, in works of art and in real life. Many have reflected on them. Few have expressed them with the same clarity, compassion and force.
Anna Aslanyan
Anne Worthington, The Unheard (Confingo Publishing)
This is the saddest book I have ever read.
The Pullans, Mary and Tom, are an elderly working class couple who are failing physically (in her case) and mentally (in his), slowly losing sight of themselves, and of each other. Their decline is subtly and acutely observed, from within and without, as the novel tracks backwards from 1999 (when the first part is set) to 1984 and then, finally, to 1933. We learn of events in the recent and remote past, and their impact on Tom's failing memory in the present day. That Mary and Tom's 'now' is already a quarter of a century ago adds to the reader's sense of life passing at a terrifying pace.
The author's tone throughout is assured, tender and heartbreakingly honest. I was repeatedly stopped in my tracks by a phrase or a sentence, or the emotional arc of a paragraph. There are many passages, especially in the first section, that pierce the heart and stay in the mind. Her prose is both simple and deep, and often has an unforced incantatory quality:
They always thought he would be the one to go first. And that she would look after him. He was older than she was, and she had good health. That was what they'd thought.
I struggle to find other quotes to show the power and originality of the author's prose — the effect is cumulative, and inexorable. Like Beckett's old man Krapp reading Effi Brest, the book 'scalded the eyes out of me.' This is a book to share with all the people you care for them most, a book to pass on without a word of warning. The author is a photographer based in Manchester. This is her first novel.
David Collard
Rosalind Brown, Practice (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
‘The alarm goes off’. Practice, Rosalind Brown’s debut novel, opens with its protagonist’s snapping into consciousness, and the book hews close to that consciousness throughout. It’s a day-in-the-life novel, openly indebted to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but its refusal to evade the mundane (and the grosser) bits of mental and bodily life might owe something, too, to that other great piece of diurnal modernism, Joyce’s Ulysses. I drop these big names in part because Practice is an unabashedly, deeply literary book — or rather a book whose literariness is deep because it’s so much on the surface. A young woman, Annabel, is studying English at Oxford. It is ‘the worn-out end of January’. She has an essay to write, on Shakespeare’s sonnets; it’s due tomorrow. Annabel is disciplined to the point of asceticism, or denial: her meals are precisely timed and weighed, her solitude a sharp pleasure. There is a man, Rich, who is older, but not seedy. And then there is the interior life, the elaborate fantasies of sex and intellect, neither wholly inspiration nor distraction, but a sort of suffusing or superimposing of the real world with that in the mind.
All of this is not without its possible turnoffs. Practice is not an expansive novel, nor, beyond Annabel’s occasional twinges of middle-class guilt, a social or political one. (Some critics levied the lame charge of pretension, embarrassed, I reckon, by encountering someone who actually loves reading and writing, and talks about that love.) It isn’t interested in theorising the way we live now. It drives ceaselessly inward, picking at the filaments of experience, picking them apart. Brown’s gamble is that, with proper attention to the texture of experience, and the right expressions of that texture, some transmutation will occur, some explosion of the particular. And it does: this novel that largely takes place in one room is one of the most capacious I’ve read in years. Brown is Henry James’ ideal writer, ‘someone on whom nothing is lost’, which is to say she’s one for whom everything is there to be found. Her writing, from the turn of phrase (Annabel, concentrating, ‘clench[es] her brain over a book’) to the balance of a paragraph, is extraordinary: every word is the right word. Brown’s prose shares with Woolf a quality of mystery inhabiting precision, or even a mysticism, what is said and what can’t be circling and surrounding each other. Her language is in this way poetic, but this isn’t poetry – it is a novel, about perfectionism, and, I want to say, perfect.
Ben Philipps
Forrest Gander, Mojave Ghost (New Directions)
Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost: A Novel Poem isn’t a long narrative but rather an extended meditation. While hiking along the San Andreas Fault not far from his childhood hometown of Barstow, California, Gander experienced a self-fracturing. This was partly due to the encounter with geologic time, a loss of oneself into the cracks in the earth—themselves like ‘the cuts / of an amateur’s autopsy.’ But it was also a response to grief; Gander had recently lost both his first wife and his mother. A stable, cohesive subjectivity became impossible: ‘I simply / finds no way.’
Grief has left him unanchored, cast adrift. But in his native desert soil (with its ‘molecular sand’ and ‘ant-fenestrated dirt’), he also becomes unstuck from time. Residual past and latent future crash into each other, and the ghosts of loved ones become vividly present. Like a prophet in the wilderness, he is hit by ‘a light so sharp, it’s percussive.’ Something has been revealed, suddenly realised, in the arid terrain: Ya me cayó el veinte, as they say.
As a response to grief, Mojave Ghost affirms that one must keep on keeping on; the self is ever becoming, evolving, unfolding. ‘I am not that any longer. / I am otherwise now,’ Gander reflects. ‘Don’t I continually outdo myself?’ The Mojave has a long history of transcendental visions, and Gander feels at home playing a role as a detonated desert Rimbaud: ‘It’s not that I is another, but that my life is always elsewhere.’
The fun trick of the book is that Gander’s ‘I’ is continually balanced by other unassigned pronouns — he, she, you. One gets the impression that he is writing of himself and a lover, or an object of his affection. It might be his late wife, the poet C. D. Wright, or it might be his new wife, the artist Ashwini Bhat, or it might be his mother. It might not matter. But the slippage of pronominal perspectives and verb tenses liberates these verses from time, an effect like that of Bob Dylan’s lyrics in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Gander’s lines are similarly launched into a ghostly, exhilarating plane — a ‘thaumaturgic canyon path' vibrant with humanity.
John Hay
Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Ghost Pains (And Other Stories)
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a writer of portals, slippages, betweenness. Herself an exile — she is an American in Geneva, where she works as a climate journalist — she excels in the unease of suspended states. In the eleven short stories of Ghost Pains, there is plenty of unease to go around. There’s the jaded jewellery consultant on her Tuscan honeymoon (‘Honeymoon’), who rather preferred being a fiancée. There’s the narrator of ‘Letter to the Senator’, who’s ‘neither an influencer nor a writer nor an analyst, teacher, lawyer, not really gainfully employed in any taxable way — I slip through the cracks’; at a party at her friend Eileen’s, she does literally this, falling into the floorboards and observing her friends through the slats.
Particularly memorable is the socially anxious narrator of the opening story, ‘The Party’, a US expatriate in Berlin. Regretting a sudden urge to send a party invitation to everyone she knows, she decides to retract it for everyone but her dear friend Ann, the only guest to reply. Unfortunately, by the time of the first fateful ring of the doorbell, it is too late to realise that she has done precisely the opposite: by replying solely to Ann, she ensured that only Ann received the cancellation. (‘Oh, the nuance of reply versus reply all!’) That’s another of Stevens’s hobby horses: the apprehension of being online. These are human comedies, not internet stories, but Stevens is interested in the digital ether; it is part of the book’s ghostly ambience, a layer of intangible film. That said, the one story that takes the internet as its subject, ‘Rumpel’, is a hoot. A data miner at an insurance company amasses a crypto fortune in his spare time. After he is locked out of his account, he is visited by a trickster imp who speaks in binary code. ‘I can calculate your password,’ says the imp, ‘but in return, you must give me your next girlfriend.’
None of this does justice to the book’s surpassing strangeness, or to Stevens’s prose — wry, musical, cliché-free, with a knack for the well-chosen exclamation point. To convey a sense of it, I propose another in-between: imagine the confluence of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, postmodern systems fiction and the European novels of Henry James.
Daniel Marc Janes
Miranda July, All Fours (Canongate)
It is a testament to Miranda July’s powers as a writer that I empathise as strongly as I do with the narrator of her latest novel, All Fours, a middle-aged woman labouring under the duelling forces of perimenopause and desire, compulsively masturbating her way through a midlife crisis that is transforming both her marriage and her relationship to her body. Early in the novel, the narrator, an artist whose background sounds a lot like July’s, abandons a planned solo road trip from California to New York and shacks up instead at a motel a half hour drive from her home. There, over two weeks, she blows her trip’s budget (a cool 20k she was paid when a whiskey company licensed a sentence she wrote about handjobs for an ad) on renovating a dingy motel room, and falls madly in love with a young, obscenely-jacked, aspiring breakdancer who works at a Hertz car rental office. The narrator’s real problems begins when she returns home, only to be haunted by memories of what could have been with the jacked, aspiring breakdancer, leaving her languishing ever more intensely in a staid marriage in which the rest of her days seem frighteningly mapped out before her.
That, ostensibly, is the plot, but the real joy in reading All Fours are the inspiringly weird sentences of which July’s mind seems endlessly capable. The novel is a uniquely interesting take on marriage, a subject which has long cast a dreary shadow over literature and not only managed to make it feel newly relevant, but also deeply funny. July’s narrator may not have ironed out all of the details of her new way of living in the world by the novel’s end, but as she leans into her moment of bodily possession — and begins to realise the difference between ‘a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising’ — this reader felt happy enough just to have been taken along for the ride.
Tadhg Hoey
Anne Carson, Wrong Norma (Jonathan Cape)
Anne Carson operates like a novelist and attacks her material at oblique angles. Her organising principles, though — her eyes, I should say, those orbs she forces the reader to look out of — are a poet’s. She wants to look at this thing and then that other thing. She wants to move on and back and ahead and behind like starlings throwing themselves across the evening sky: this tilt that slant no that one. The book is about time and the simultaneity of lives: the utter inexplicable wrongness of a world in which some of us can go for a nice swim in a lake and return home and make tea and open the newspaper to read about those other human beings who find themselves capsized in a boat in the Mediterranean and are never found again. This place, the world, our experience of it: it makes no sense. ‘To be alive is just this pouring in and out,’ she writes. 'Ethics minimal.’
Any book about time of course being a book about death: ‘At any rate there is a rolling all-pervasive upwash of dread, one great hot shooting surge of dread-sensation throughout mind and body, a sense,’ she writes, 'of Time, carrying a body on and from Sunday night to Monday morning to every Monday morning after that and on and on to extinction, this progress, this exasperating, nonnegotiable, obliterating motion into the dark.’ Elsewhere she asks ‘What is the price of desolation and who pays. Some questions don’t warrant a question mark.’ At the same time, as is often the case with Carson, eros pulsates everywhere in those eyes: “If you bring a concept or category up close enough to the human mind to be very very attractive,’ she writes, ‘and then whisk it away so it stays out of reach, it becomes erotic.’
Nathan Knapp
Rachel Cattle, Uh Huh Her (Moist Books)
‘[...] patterned like a dazzle ship, elegant shades and strokes more like fabric or an ancient Japanese painting’: in general I think I like writing about artists when it feels close to science fiction, which is why I liked Rachel Cattle’s Uh Huh Her. It is a novel in the form of a paratactic dramatic monologue, and follows an unnamed narrator (more or less identifiable as Cattle) from school to art school to teaching.
Alongside glimpses of the narrator’s own real and imagined artworks and films are a series of broken ekphrastic descriptions that turn into biographic asides, and vice versa: these range from the enlivening and personally instructive (the work of Ann Quin, PJ Harvey and Kelly Reichardt, for instance, and her mother’s annotated copy of The Golden Notebook) to the spiritually oppressive (conversations with a smug Chris Kraus-reading man called The Analyst). It is a wry beautiful book about the dreams and unspecified resentments of women and artists; applicable to everyone, however, is its ending, which is a quote from a tarot card containing the unreliable promise of all careers and autobiographies:
After much hard work, this card indicates a time of opulence and luxury, all resulting in a feeling of satisfaction, emotional comfort and peace. All of this is due to one’s intelligence and self-control and represents an achievement that has lasted over a lifetime.
Alice Brewer
Rónán Hession, Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose Books)
Rónán Hession’s Ghost Mountain confirms the author as a major voice in contemporary fiction. When I reviewed the novel earlier this year, it was the vividly imagined characters and blissfully sad comedy that captured my attention. The plot unfurls following the overnight appearance of a mountain, a thing usually born from the deep time of the planet suddenly existing on a human timescale. The people around it interpret the mountain in myriad ways: spiritual sign; grave omen; scientific wonder; of no importance whatsoever. Thinking about Ghost Mountain again now, as winter firmly takes root, when the light changes how we see things, I realise it is also a novel about how the natural world invites us to pay attention, to be more sensitive to change and time passing. Ghost Mountain is a wise book worth reading and rereading.
W.J. Davies