Iron Lung

Kirstine Reffstrup is a Danish author whose debut novel, I, Unica (about the German artist and writer Unica Zürn), was nominated for number of prizes. Now her 2023 novel, Iron Lung, has been translated into English by Hunter Simpson and published by Peirene Press. The novel is divided into two distinct stories, one set in a hospital in Copenhagen in 1952 and the other in an orphanage in Hungary in 1913. The first tells the story of a teenage girl, Agnes, in an iron lung, a mechanical respirator she has been placed inside as a consequence of catching polio. Being inside the device leaves her almost entirely helpless:

“I can’t use my hands, I can only move my left one and move it a little, and I need help with everything. With washing myself, with eating. I have to lie completely still in the iron lung with my arms at my side while my body is pumped with air…”

Agnes will spend months inside the iron lung, with only visits from her mother and her friend, Ella, to break the monotony. The language suggests her mother’s visits are not entirely welcome, as she “bends over the iron lung as if it were a coffin” and “her hands crawl over my body,” whereas Ella is described as a “sister” to her. As the novel progresses, we see Ella become more distant from Agnes as she is able to embrace her developing sexually in a way Agnes cannot, telling her:

“I was out last night. All night. With a man, he invited me out… he told me to take off my clothes, and I wanted to do it quickly, but he said slowly, slowly and I didn’t understand why. He sucked on my breasts, he examined every part of my body as if I was the sick one.”

Agnes’ reaction is to cry, not because she unable to experience life like her friend, but because she fears she is losing Ella. Perhaps, it is suggested, she is jealous not of Ella but of the man. Earlier, when her friend brought her a diaphragm, the first sign that she was maturing more quickly, it is Ella she imagines:

“The men stand over Ella. She spreads her legs and their eyes flash as they fumble with the diaphragm, looking up at her hole, and they’re all naked and blushing and bashful.”

Agnes’ story alone would not sustain a novel, but it is paired with the story of Boy (later Iggy), a baby abandoned by its mother near Budapest in the early twentieth century. Agnes first feels a connection to Iggy’s story when she faints as a result of the polio:

“When I fell to the asphalt, the old world disappeared…I was somewhere I’ve never been before. In a city I’ve only read about in books. The city was called Budapest… I reached out my hand. I saw my own birth. It really was me.”

There are hints that there is something unusual about the baby as the midwife “touched its genitals with a thumb and sighed”, describing it as a “strange child”

“The first of its kind

and the last.”

The child is taken in by nuns at an orphanage for boys, and is called ‘Boy’, but they when they are older they realise they are different:

“I have slender wrists and light down over my lip. My sex is smooth and arching like a big goose egg.”

Any idea that they are simply a girl, hiding their gender among all the male orphans, is contradicted by the fact that they are taken to a doctor in Budapest to be x-rayed:

“Dr Vajda says that he will print the pictures in a scientific journal, to share their findings about me, my body, the walking mystery that I am.”

What isn’t in doubt is the treatment they receive when the boys at the orphanage discover their secret which will see them leave to forge a new life. Boy’s story is obviously more dramatic, but also more intriguing, particularly the conjunction of the character’s uncertain gender with the early part of the twentieth century. However, both parts if the novel work on their own terms: Refferstrup is especially adept at creating a sense of period. Where Iron Lung does not quite work, for me at least, is in the combination of the two as one does not seem to reflect the other in a meaningful way. Each is so well-written, however, that this flaw only occasionally detracts from the experience of reading.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Brian Moore’s first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne published in 1955, was not actually his first novel – he had already written a series of pulp thrillers and would go on to write three more after. It is, however, very far from the thrills implied in A Bullet for my Lady and This Gun for Gloria despite sharing the author’s love of a female-centred title. There is nothing in the way of violence in Judith Hearne unless one counts the violent passions that arise in Judith, a middle-aged spinster, on the appearance of her landlady’s brother, James Madden, from New York where he has spent most of his adult life. (Moore similarly left Ireland for Canada in 1949, and would later live in New York).

Hearne lives a lonely, unfulfilled life, moving from boarding house to boarding house (we think, initially, as a result of her high standards), counting every coin she spends as her pupils (she teaches piano) dwindle in number, and unlikely ever to marry now that she is in her forties. Watched over by a picture of the aunt she nursed through the prime years of her life, and Jesus with his Scared Heart, she seems content with her limited existence until she meets Madden:

“He was a big man. He alone had risen when she entered… Who else but an American would wear that big bluestone ring on his finger.”

His manners (important to Hearn who has earlier dismissed her landlady’s son, Bernard, as having “no manners, staring like that”) and the glamour of his stateside life are attractive to Hearne; her interest in that life pleases Madden. Yet, she immediately fears rejection:

“He would, see her shyness, her stiffness. And it would frighten him, he would remember he was alone with her… he would see the hysteria in her eyes, the hateful hot flush in her cheeks. And he would go as all men had gone before him.”

This fear is rooted in her desperate loneliness, which Moore exposes in the pages which follow. Her meagre budget is such she cannot afford to eat lunch, describing hunger as an “expensive little rascal”. She meets an ex-pupil only to discover he has a new music teacher:

“You’d think I had the plague or something. That’s four pupils gone in the last six months.”

The only bright spot in her week is Sunday, “the great day of the week,” her only social occasion when she visits the O’Neill’s. The visit is viewed as a chore by their children, Shaun describing it as “the advent of the Great Bore” before disappearing to study, as does his sister, Una. The routine nature her visit is emphasised by their mimicking of her greeting, “It’s only me,” and her regular refusal of a third glass of sherry. Hearne is both aware of this but unable to break free from the straitjacket of her repetitive existence:

“There! She’d done it again, saying something she always said. She saw the small cruel smile on Una’s face…”

It is this awareness that prevents Hearne being simply a figure of fun to the reader as she is to the children. Where they assume that she is contented with her unchanging routine, we sense that she still hopes, as she does with Madden. At the same time, Moore suggests from the beginning that her feelings are not reciprocated:

“Friendly, she is. And educated. Those rings and that gold wristwatch. They’re real. A pity she looks like that.”

The emphasis on her expensive jewellery and dismissal of her looks indicate that, though Madden may admire her sophistication, he does not view her romantically. Throughout the novel, Moore will allow the reader glimpses of Hearne from the point of view of other characters, enhancing the essential tragedy of her story. Her weakness for alcohol is also hinted at on her first visit to the O’Neill’s:

“The first sip was delicious, steadying, making you want a big swallow. But it has to last.”

Even the language (“a big swallow”) suggests the loss of decorum that will come with drinking. As Hearne loses the tight control she attempts to hold on her life by constantly denying herself there is something to admire as well as regret. Moore’s ability to write the life of a middle-aged woman is quite remarkable and though the novel may not be a ‘thriller’ the narrative tension is, at times, exquisite.

Piercing

Ryu Murakimi’s Piercing was originally published in 1994 and became the second of his novels to be translated into English (by Ralph McCarthy) in 2007. A dark thriller of dysfunctional love and damaged individuals, it begins with new father Kawashima Masayuki watching over his baby as she sleeps. This tender scene takes an unexpected turn when he takes an ice pick from his pocket and lifts the baby’s blanket to expose her neck and chest:

“Gripping the ice pick lightly to minimise the trembling, he placed the point of it next to the baby’s cheek.”

Kawashima’s compulsion lies in his past, firstly in an abusive childhood which he has confessed to his wife, Yoko, where his mother regularly beat him:

“What bothered me most, though, was that I was the only one she hit. She never laid a finger on my baby brother.”

What Yoko does not know is that this led to a relationship with an older woman when Kawashima was seventeen. Kawashima lives with the woman, a stripper in her thirties, who often brings men back to the apartment and then complains when he tolerates this – and when he doesn’t:

“What a hateful bitch, Kawashima used to think – how does a person ever get to be this despicable? He was sure he was the only one in the world who could ever care about her.”

One particularly ferocious argument ends with Kawashima deliberately placing his hand in boiling water and then stabbing the woman with an ice pick when she is in the shower. His memory of the incident is vague after that point, though he knows the woman survived. The last thing he remembers is the ice pick falling under the bathtub and he imagines it is still there “and he somehow felt the day would come when he’d go back there to see.” Perhaps this sense that the incident remains ‘unfinished’ leads to his present compulsion which he dismisses as “just a remnant of those times, just an echo from the past.” Despite this he decides:

“There’s only one way to overcome the fear: you’ve got to stab someone else with an ice pick.”

If the novel was only about Kawashima’s plan to lure a prostitute to a hotel room and kill her it would make for a tense if conventional thriller, but Murakami moves the narrative perspective to that of the prostitute before she arrives. Sanada Chiaki is a young woman with her own problems. She is worried that her sex drive had disappeared (“she couldn’t detect so much as zero point one milligram of sexual desire anywhere in her body”) which scares her as “it had always been the first stage of that awful cycle…

“The cycle of terror that took hold with the sudden realisation that she alone was to blame for all the bad things happening around her.”

The single nipple that she has pierced herself (presumably a more transgressive action in 1990s Japan than now) thrills her as a symbol of being able to “choose your own pain” – now she is worried “it would be choosing her.”

Like Kawashima, Chiaki was abused as a child – in her case, sexually abused by her father. She is similarly haunted by the past:

“When these sleeping memories are awakened, they begin to squirm and then to swim, slowly at first, but gradually faster, up to the surface. And once they get there, your senses shut down.”

Both Chiaki and Kawashima disassociate to survive. Chiaki imagines she is watching herself have sex:

“At first I used to ask her not to look at me like that, but all she would do is snicker, so I stopped. Besides, I was afraid that if I talked to her too much, I might divide into two separate people.”

When Kawashima was being beaten by his mother as a child he also separated into two:

“As a boy, he’d escaped the pain and terror of his mother’s beatings by concentrating on the thought that the one who was being hit wasn’t really him.”

The two are more alike than they realise but also have a very confused relationship with reality. The novel could actually be seen as a twisted romance where the suitability of the couple is more apparent to the reader than to the characters, and they meanwhile seem intent on placing barriers (for example, murder) between them. As the novel progresses, the narrative itself begins to move freely between the characters, outlining a series of misunderstandings.

Piercing certainly has the sex and violence one is led to expect from Ryu Murakami, but beneath its pulpy exterior it reflects on the legacy of abuse. Not only is Kawashima fully developed as character, but so is his ‘victim’, Chiaki. In its crazed and chaotic denouement, there is also something quite touching.

The Suicides

As translator Esther Allen points out in her afterword, it was fellow novelist Juan Jose Saer who first referred to Antonio di Benedetto’s novels Zama, The Silentiary and The Suicides as a “Trilogy of Expectation.” Now, almost ten years after the first, the third and final novel has appeared in her translation. Unlike the previous novels – Zama is set at the end of the 18^th century and The Silentiary shortly after World War Two – The Suicides feels contemporary with its original publication in 1969. Its nameless narrator, a journalist, also feels closer to Benedetto himself, whose father died when he was eleven, possibly by his own hand. The novel begins:

“My father took his life on a Friday afternoon.

He was thirty-three.

I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.”

And so the story takes on an urgency that goes beyond the journalist’s deadline when the narrator is asked to investigate a photograph of two suicides:

“There’s terror in their eye. But their mouths are grimacing in sombre pleasure.”

Their expression echoes the contradictions of the narrator. As he explores death, his mind frequently strays to sex – “Here, along the sidewalk, comes a blouse with a lot going on inside,” he thinks as he leaves the office. A girlfriend, Julia, does not prevent him looking for other sexual encounters, or even relationships, symbolic of a more general sense of dissatisfaction with his life. (His relationship with Julia is perhaps best summed up when he says, “she accedes to my desires, as docile as ever”). He is paired with a photographer, Marcela, whom he freely admits to disliking, yet determinedly attempts to discover if she is single. There is also a dichotomy between his ability to look clearly at the darker side of life and his need for escape, which often takes the form of a science fiction film at the cinema.

The initial photograph leads to a wider investigation into suicide for a series of articles which are apparently never written. A key component of the novel is the interpolation of facts on the subject provided by Bibi, the agency translator. The narrator and Marcela visit the scene of a double suicide, two boys, and speak to the father, though the suggestion of a relationship (“Why’d they do it? Things weren’t working out between them?”) is ignored by the police officer. The idea of a suicide pact will provide the novel with its conclusion.

Though the article the narrator is writing has a nominal deadline, the novel moves inward rather than forward as his research widens, and the urgency seems to come from his fear that he, too, is a suicide. He remembers walking with his grandfather:

“Then he would proclaim in his Italian dialect that I understood perfectly, ‘Twelve – twelve suicides there have been among us.”

Julia, too, is sucked into his obsession with death when she asks her class to write on the topic – an assignment which the principal and parents regard with distaste. The incident both demonstrates the narrator’s egotism (he has little thought for the problems he has caused her – “I tell myself that in the end, it’s all so much theatre”) and society’s reluctance to face the inevitable. As the novel progresses the proposed series of articles on suicide increasingly resembles the narrator’s life, When the editor laments the lack of publication possibilities (“It won’t be any use, there are no buyers…”):

“I ask whether the series is cancelled. He says not yet.”

The novel is full of striking incident – a woman who claims to hear voices, a body exhumed with a missing hand – but it is the narrator’s own journey which holds the reader’s real attention, told in a tone that seeks the cynicism of the hardboiled detective but is secretly too earnest for that role. Whether it is a true trilogy or not, the publication of all three novels in English is to be celebrated.

Vanishing World

Sayaka Murata’s breakthrough novel in English, Convenience Store Woman, was actually her tenth book in Japanese, and now we have the novel she released before it, translated as Vanishing World by Ginny Tapley Takemori, who has translated all of her work so far. As we now know from Earthlings and the short story collection Life Ceremony, Convenience Store Woman is a tamer exploration of the themes which reoccur in Murata’s work. Vanishing World once again concerns an outsider, Amane, but one who exists in a very different society, a version of the future where attitudes towards marriage, family and sexual desire have undertaken a dramatic transformation. In a brief prelude, which will reappear chronologically later, we are introduced to the twenty-year-old Amane as “the last human left having sex,” a comment that will only be fully explained once we come to terms with the world Murata is presenting to us, one where sexual relief is divorced from love, and marriage is steadfastly asexual with everyone fitted with a contraceptive device when they become sexually mature.

When Amane is a young child and her mother tells her, “you too will marry the man you love and have his baby,” she does not realise that this represents an eccentric, even perverted, view of marriage in contemporary society:

“I was in a sex education class in the fourth year of school when I discovered that I had been conceived by an abnormal method.”

No longer are married couples expected to be sexually attracted to each other, and conception is conducted artificially. Individuals still fall in love, but generally with imaginary characters:

“When you and a friend were both in love with the same character, it brought you closer together.”

Murata is, of course, describing a common experience of adolescence, where crushes develop on characters who are, or may as well be, imaginary. In Amane’s world, however, it is not expected that you will grow out of this, and even if later you take a real person as a ‘lover’, it would be unusual to actually make love to them. What marks Amane as an outsider is her sexual desire, which she experiences with her first imaginary love, Lapis:

“I shook my stiffened legs and had the sensation that all the blood in my body was fizzing and popping, then all the strength drained out of me.”

Murata revels in such unusual descriptions as it is quite common for her characters not to know what they are experiencing. She is also adept at world building, though this often involves an element of repetition. Amane finds a boy, Mizuuchi, who is also in love with Lapis and convinces him to have sex with her:

“By trial and error, after numerous attempts, Mizuuchi finally managed to get his part into my body.”

This will not be the only time in the novel she has to persuade a man to have sex with her, which they will only do to please her, generally finding the act distasteful. Most people share the view of her friend, Juri:

“These days you don’t have to fall in love with someone to breed… so all sorts of anime characters have been created for our sexual gratification. They’re just consumables to help us process our desire. It won’t be long before nobody bothers to have sex anymore.”

Society is changing even during Amane’s lifetime. Just as the novel seems caught in a loop of Amane’s need for physical connection setting her at odds with the world she is living in “I do really love you, Amane,” her latest lover tells her, “but I just can’t handle sex.”), she decides to move with her husband to an experimental city where all children are parented by all adults:

“In this city everyone was expected to live alone. The concepts of couples and families were considered disruptive…”

One reason they move there is that it allows her husband to also have the opportunity to give birth using an artificial womb, but Amane is determined that the sperm and egg used will be theirs and reacts angrily when he says “and all these children are mine”:

“What are you talking about? Our child hasn’t been born yet, has it?”

She continues as an outsider in a society that wishes to eliminate the individual and prizes conformity above all. Vanishing World, like many dystopias, becomes more plausible the longer you spend there. It is a world where human emotion is written out and replaced by rational design, where science is utilised to create homogeneity. Murata, as always, is on the side of difference, continuing to provoke and shock us out of complacency.

The Best of Elizabeth Taylor

At the beginning of 2024, having spent a pleasant three years reading the novels of Muriel Spark in chronological order (you can read my Best of Muriel Spark here), I decided to do the same with (much loved but never quite as respected as she should be) English writer Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor was first published earlier than Spark, in 1945 with At Mrs Lippincote’s, and her final novel, Blaming, appeared posthumously in 1976. She wrote only twelve novels (compared to Spark’s twenty-two) but here are five of my favourites.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont remains Taylor’s most famous, and for many her finest, novel so rather than create artificial suspense through order of publication (this was her final novel to appear while she was alive), let its inclusion be immediately revealed. Set in a hotel (the Claremont) which has become a refuge for those find themselves old and alone in steadily reducing circumstances, it performs a wonderful balancing act. Its characters are privileged but constantly worry about money; there is a longing for Britain’s lost past but also an attachment to youth in the form of the penniless writer, Ludo; there is a clinging on to life as death approaches; and, above all, a constant wavering between comedy and tragedy. It is this that makes the novel a masterpiece as elements of farce brush shoulders with moments of real poignancy and the sometimes caricaturish characters suddenly live and breath in three dimensions. If you are only going to read one of Taylor’s novels, read this one.

A View of the Harbour

A View of the Harbour, published in 1947, is a novel of loneliness and lost dreams. Most characters live in isolation like Mrs Bracey, unable to leave her house and left to gaze out of the window (at the harbour), existing on the crumbs of conversation her daughter, Iris, deigns to give her. Iris, meanwhile, dreams of a better life but leaves that possibility to chance. The single long-lasting friendship between Tory and Beth is rather undermined by the fact that Tory is sleeping with Beth’s husband, a response to her own loneliness. The widowed Lily Wilson also makes compromises to avoid feeling alone. Ony Beth offers a sense of purpose, if not happiness, as she types out her latest novel, though her writing is as much a burden as a joy. The general air of desperation is leavened by Taylor’s wit, but this is a novel which looks at humanity with a rather jaundiced eye. Its final lines, where a sailor looks from the harbour to the town thinking “nothing has changed” reveals that Taylor is well aware the most important changes happen on the inside.

Angel

Angel, published in 1957, is probably Taylor’s funniest novel. Unlike Taylor’s other novels, its central character, the eponymous novelist Angel Deverall (her surname’s likeness to ‘devil’ clearly the first joke) is not so much flawed as grotesque. Angel is a storyteller rather than a reader as child, and is appalled to discover that, for some, her storytelling is simply lying. Her determination to become a novelist originates from a desire to avoid the future her mother has planned out for her as a servant. Her natural arrogance is evident when she refuses to make any changes to her first novel which, unforeseen by anyone but her, becomes a remarkable success. Soon she is writing one novel a year and has the wealth she dreamed of, buying the house where she was once earmarked to be a maid (if she was lucky). As is generally the case with Taylor, behind the comic frontage lies the tragedy of a woman where the very qualities which lead to her success are also the cause of her downfall.

In a Summer Season

In a Summer Season, originally published in 1961, is the most lovestruck of Taylor’s novels. At its centre is Kate Heron and her young (second) husband, Dermot, who is rather like an overgrown child, unable to make a success of anything and loving nothing more than a drink in the pub. Kate is not unaware of Dermot’s faults, but her love is charged with sexual passion – though the title suggests that this may not be enough in the long run. Kate’s grown-up children also experience love in the novel, in both cases without much reply. Louisa develops crush on the young curate, Father Blizzard, and Tom falls for the daughter of one of Kate’s friends with the equally unlikely name Araminta. It would be easy to make any of these lovestruck characters laughable, but Taylor is more generous than this, and even seems to have sympathy for Dermot’s general fecklessness. making In a Summer Season one of her sunniest books.

Hester Lilly

Finally, rather than a fifth novel, a novella, Hester Lilly, from the collection of the same name published in 1954. The premise is straightforward: orphaned teenager Hester goes to stay with her cousin, Robert (a Headmaster) and his wife Muriel. Muriel seems to have misgivings about this even before she arrives, but is relived to see her dressed in a way that emphasises her youth and poverty rather than her beauty. Slowly, however, her jealousy grows, and it is, in fact, she who suggests to Hester that she must be in love with Richard which leads the girl to assume that is what she is feeling. Muriel realises, however, that any attempt to remove Hester from the household will make her look bad. While Taylor allows the reader insight into Muriel and Hester’s thoughts, she deliberately leaves Richard’s feelings opaque, placing us in the same position as the two women. Without the need for the larger cast of a novel, this showcases Taylor’s skills on a smaller stage.