Books of the Year 2021 Part 1

Although I mainly read translated fiction, this doesn’t mean I entirely avoid contemporary novels in English (though it would be fair to say I haven’t read a wide selection). Here are five of the best I read this year:

Real Estate by Deborah Levy

The third volume in Deborah Levy’s autobiographical trilogy is not only another valuable meditation on what it means to be a (female) writer, but also a though-provoking examination of growing older, a moment of reassessment. Levy uses her biographical ‘character’ as a metaphor for her own ‘character’ development: in writing herself she considers the self she wants to write. Similarly, she uses the practicalities of life – here focusing on the simple question, where is home? – to look more deeply into the choices we have and the decisions we make. Her rebirth as a writer since Swimming Home has been a pleasure to see.

Panenka by Ronan Hession

Leonard and Hungry Paul was such a runaway word-of-mouth success that I greeted Panenka with a little trepidation. Yet, few writers can write about ordinary life as well as Ronan Hession. Here, retired footballer Joseph is at something of a crossroads in his life, but does he have the courage to both face up to his mortality and to love again? Hession’s novels are filled with sly humour, yet the laughter is never directed downwards at his characters. Not only do we find ourselves on Joseph’s side, but on that of his daughter, and even of the regulars at Vincent’s pub. Every adjective we apply to Hession’s fiction – likeable, heart-felt, hopeful – may seem like faint praise but the sincerity of his work makes the reader equally sincere.

Tokyo Redux by David Peace

The much delayed third (and best) volume in David Peace’s Tokyo trilogy confirms that he is one of England’s most important writers. In a novel which ranges over fifty years, Peace weaves together numerous strands of (possibly) the one story beginning with the death of Shimoyama Sadanori, the head of Japan’s national railway, in 1949 during the American occupation. The other two years which feature are 1964, when the Olympics were held in Tokyo, and 1989, when Emperor Showa, perhaps the last remnant of Japan’s World War Two past, died. Each section has its own voice, with Peace perhaps in less danger of verging into parody than he has been in some previous novels. Neglected as usual by all prize juries, it will be exciting to see what Peace does next.

Luckenbooth By Jenni Fagan

Jenni Fagan’s third novel proves, beyond all doubt, that her emotionally raw debut and her dystopian follow-up only scratched the surface of her talent. Featuring the same marginal characters (including William Burroughs), it presents us with almost one hundred years in the life of a building. The historical recreation is vivid, but also laced with the spirit of fairy tale and myth. Characters are fully formed within pages and the loss the reader feels as we leave one behind is only alleviated by the introduction of another, equally fascinating. Another novel which should have won prizes.

Subdivision by J Robert Lennon

American writer J Robert Lennon’s ninth novel has, sadly, not yet been published in the UK but is still well worth seeking out (it’s published by Graywolf Press in the US). It begins with the narrator checking into a guest house in the Subdivision run by Clara and the Judge – she’s not sure which is which, especially as Clara was a judge and the Judge is called Clara. Such Alice in Wonderland strangeness will only accelerate, from her electronic companion, Cylvia, an Alexa which gives her life advice, to the bakemono, able to appear in different forms but always intensely desirable and equally dangerous. And why does a small boy keep turning up? Behind it all we sense a puzzle to be solved, either by the narrator or the reader – or perhaps both.

Seven Books of Summer

Now we are in the very midst of summer, it seemed an appropriate time to suggest some summer reading, but, rather than choosing books based only on the pleasure to be had from reading them (which would presumably be unchanged even in deepest winter) here are seven which are specifically about summer and holidays…

Agostino by Alberto Moravia, translated by Michael F Moore

Agostino, Alberto Moravia’s fourth novel, written in 1942 but refused publication in fascist Italy, is set almost entirely on the beach. And when not on the beach, the characters are most likely to be found at sea. It’s a coming of age story in which the title character suddenly realises that his mother exists outwith her role as his mother a she pursues an affair with a “tanned, dark-haired young man” she has met. Meanwhile Agostino demonstrates some independence of his own as he joins a gang of rougher boys who roam the coast.

In summery: “The two of them would dry themselves languorously in the sun, which became more ardent with the approach of midday.”

Any clouds on the horizon? It’s suggested that Saro, the boatman is a paedophile – after Agostino has been out on his boat with him, he cannot convince the other boys he hasn’t been ‘interfered with’.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Swimming Home was Deborah Levy’s sixth novel (if you include Diary of a Steak) but its Booker nomination catapulted her to deservedly wider acclaim. Poet Joe Jacobs is holidaying with his family in a villa near Nice. The idyllic setting is in contrast to the cast of damaged individuals and failing relationships paraded across it, not helped by the arrival of Kitty Finch, a young women who believes she has a special connection with Jacobs.

In summery: “Two plump bumblebees crawled down the yellow curtains searching for an open window.”

Any clouds on the horizon? The novel begins with a body in the pool. This is a false alarm, but also a warning of what is to come.

The Island by Ana Maria Matute, translated by Laura Lonsdale

Ana Maria Matute’s 1960 novel, The Island, recently issued in a new translation by Laura Lonsdale, is set on the island of Mallorca, now a popular holiday destination, though not so much at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War when the action takes place. The story is told from the point of view of Matia, a fourteen-year-old girl, who is staying on the island with her grandmother as her mother is dead, she has been expelled from her convent school, and her father has abandoned her to fight for the Republic. Over the course of the novel she is exposed to the prejudices and violence of the island.

In summery: “Santa Catalina had a very small beach with a fringe of golden seashells at the water’s edge, and the seashells cracked under our feet as we leapt from the boat, shattering like bits of crockery.”

Any clouds on the horizon? Though the war is distant, the island does not escape its repercussions. Matia and her friend Borja discover a body on the beach one day…

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein

Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, written prior to her Neapolitan quartet, tells the story of a middle-aged woman, Leda, who feels liberated when her daughters leave home and decides to take a holiday by the sea in southern Italy. Once there, though she finds herself observing a young mother and her child. When the child goes missing it is Leda who finds her and, mysteriously, keeps hold of the girl’s doll.

In summery: “The sand was white powder, I took a long swim in transparent water, and sat in the sun.”

Any clouds on the horizon? The missing child may seem like the novel’s most dramatic moment, but Leda ahs a secret in her past to be discovered.

Year of the Drought by Roland Buti, translated by Charlotte Mandell

Anyone of a certain age will remember the eerily hot summer of 1976 where Roland Buti sets his coming of age story, Year of the Drought. For thirteen-year-old Gus, the sun is not a pleasure as his father is a farmer who recently bought hundreds of chickens which are now dying in the intense heat. This is not his father, or Gus’, only worry as a newcomer to the village has developed a very close friendship with Gus’ mother, and his parents’ marriage is under threat.

In summery: “The heat that had accumulated during the day now rose freely up to the sky. A warm wind, sequinned with burning particles, swooped down from the mountains like the breath of a huge animal crouching in the shadows.”

Any clouds on the horizon? The scene where Gus helps his dad clear out the dead chickens is far from pleasant.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

“She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds…” doesn’t immediately suggest ‘summer holiday’ but Spark’s 1970 novel begins with Lise shopping for holiday clothes before she flies to a city in southern Europe (probably Rome) in search of the ‘right man’. Of course, in Lise’s case, she means the right man to kill her. Spark described the novel as a ‘whydunnit’ but don’t imagine that question will receive an answer.

In summery: “…they stand on the pavement in the centre of the foreign city, in need of coffee and a sandwich, accustoming themselves to the layout, the traffic crossings, the busy residents, the ambling tourists and the worried tourists, and such of the unencumbered youth who swing and thread through the crowds like antelopes whose heads, invisibly antlered, are airborne high to sniff the prevailing winds, and who so appear to own the terrain beneath their feet that they never look at it.”

Any clouds on the horizon? As is often the case with Spark’s novels, we are well aware of what is on the horizon long before we reach it.

Holiday Heart by Margarita Garcia Robayo, translated by Charlotte Coombe

Don’t be fooled by the apparently happy-go-lucky title – holiday heart is, in fact, a heart condition caused by over-indulging while on vacation. In Margarita Garcia Robayo’s novel it might also suggest that Pablo and Lucia, married nineteen years, find that their own hearts have left home. Pablo finds solace in other women as Lucia becomes colder. He is in danger of losing his job, she of losing touch with her children.

In summery: “He rubbed his eyes. They were still dazzled from the glare of the afternoon sun bouncing off the sand, white and burning like dry ice.”

Any clouds on the horizon? As well as Pablo’s possibly life-threatening heart condition, there are numerous uncomfortable scenes, including their young son declaring on the beach, “I don’t like black people.”

The Cost of Living

The opening pages of Deborah Levy’s memoir, The Cost of Living, are perhaps the least personal. In them she is the observer, the narrator of another woman’s story, as she watches a young woman approached by an older man. When the young woman tells him a story of surfacing from a scuba-dive to discover a storm, his only reaction is to say, “You talk a lot don’t you.”

“It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character.”

Levy uses this seemingly incidental anecdote throughout to make sense of the experience she undergoes as her marriage ends:

“My marriage was the boat and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown.”

When she discusses her situation with a friend, he tells her, “It seems to me you would be better off finding another way to live.” The Cost of Living details Levy’s search for another way to live. (Every time I hear the title I unconsciously add two words from James Kennaway’s final novel, The Cost of Living Like This, which, beyond the commonplace that live itself demands a price, suggests that there are different ways to live, and choices to be made).

Just as Levy uses her initial observation to frame her story, so too the ordinary facts of her own life encapsulate moments in her emotional journey. She moves into a flat in North London with her two daughters; her furniture – the fridge, the bed, the sofa – is too large for the smaller space:

“It was futile to try to fit an old life into a new life.”

The kitchen is infested with moths – “like something out of a Garcia Marquez novel” – and these too become linked to her attempt to move on:

“I battled with the moths and various griefs and the past, all of which returned every day to torment me…”

The story of Levy’s life is also the story of her writing – the cost of living entails earning a living. In her small flat she has nowhere to write, but luckily a friend allows her to work in her shed (A Shed of One’s Own, perhaps). This is just as lacking in luxury as it sounds:

“The day I moved into the shed, it was snowing. The freezer wheezed its cold vapours. There were spiderwebs on the roof, dust on everything, leaves and mud on the floor. How was I to make a viable space to write in winter?”

Other writers populate Levy’s thoughts frequently – Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras in particular – but also vitally: she converses with them rather than simply quoting. Unsurprisingly she reflects on her new life in relation to her gender:

“It was possible that femininity, as I had been taught it, had come to an end… It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the early twenty-first century. What would it cost to step out of character and stop the story?”

It is a theme she returns to again at the end:

“When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking. There are plenty of tears but it is better to walk through the black and bluish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels.”

The bravery and determination needed to venture into the unknown in search of a freer life (a “vague destination, no one knows what it looks like when we get there”) is likened to her writing: writing a novel, she says, is “like a long-haul flight, final destination unknown.” This memoir, too, feels like an exploration; amid the daily turmoil (Levy also has to cope with her mother’s death in the year or so the book covers) Levy continues to probe and question, which is perhaps what makes her work so quotable. The Cost of Living is worth every penny.

Hot Milk

In her latest novel, Hot Milk, Deborah Levy once again (as in Swimming Home – a villa in Nice – and The Unloved – a French chateau) takes us on holiday. In Levy’s hands, however, these sun-bleached beaches, glittering pools and glaringly white buildings become other-worldly, as altered in her handling as Ballard’s suburban Britain. (Though, to be fair, Ballard himself wasn’t averse to getting out the passport in his later novels like Cocaine Nights). This time we are in Almeria, mingling with tourists, but on a different mission. Sofia and her mother, Rose, have come not to holiday but to heal at the hands of Dr Gomez, a last resort made possible by re-mortgaging their home. Rose is unable to walk, a mystery that no medical professional in the UK has been able to solve, and Sofia’s life has been placed on hold as she cares for her:

“The dream is over for me…. It ended when she became ill and I abandoned my Ph. D. The unfinished thesis I wrote for my doctorate still lurks in a digital file behind the shattered screen saver like an unclaimed suicide.”

As her future fades, Sofia becomes less and less certain who she is in her present. This is highlighted when she is stung by a jelly fish and must write down her name, age, country of origin, and occupation: when it comes to the latter she doesn’t know what to write. Even her nationality is in doubt, with a Greek surname from a father she hasn’t seen in years pointing towards a language she doesn’t speak. She puzzles Dr Gomez by referring to her mother as ‘Rose’. As he says, “identity is always difficult to guarantee.”

Rose’s identity is her illness; as Sofia says, “I have been sleuthing my mother’s symptoms for as long as I can remember.” Her father leaves because he, too, has adopted a new identity:

“My father suffered a religious conversion but as far as I know he has not got over it.”

In both cases, these identities allow her parents to undermine Sofia’s sense of self: her father simply ceases to see her, as if she were no longer his daughter; her mother reduces her to the role of carer, even complaining about her to Gomez:

“Sofia is lazy when it comes to putting a glass of water by my bed at night.”

At times Sofia finds it difficult to separate herself from Rose. Shaking Gomez’s hand on behalf of her mother she thinks, “Her arm is my arm.” Later on the beach:

“Sometimes, I find myself limping. It’s as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother.”

From the moment we meet Gomez we sense that he is suspicious of Rose’s illness:

“His tone was vague. Vaguely mocking and vaguely amiable.”

He encourages her to reduce her medication, and the treatment becomes a battle of wills as Rose refuses to admit her health, even suggesting she might have her feet amputated. However, Gomez gives Sofia courage, as does her holiday romance with Ingrid, a woman, she admits, who is “not a safe person to love.” Just as Sofia struggles to see herself, so too she finds it hard to visualise Ingrid or the relationship clearly. She first meets Ingrid when she thinks she is a man in the Ladies’ toilets. Later, Ingrid gives her a blouse with a word stitched into it, but it is a different word to the one Sofia reads there.

The novel is the story of Sofia’s attempt to free herself, just as she wants to free the dog of owner of the diving-school, Pablo. But, as Ingrid points out, freedom is never straight-forward:

“There is a problem, Zoffie. Pablo’s dog has been badly treated. He will not know what to do with his freedom. The dog will run through the village and eat all the babies.”

Hot Milk (is the title a reference to maternal comforts?) is a novel about freeing yourself from family, not only those who cling to you, but also those who reject you. In pushing Rose to find the first step she needs to save her life, Sofia hopes to save her own. It’s another sharp, insightful novel by Levy, who writes realism (like Ballard) by jarring the probable against the possible. Its recent appearance on the Goldsmith’s Prize shortlist (as well as the Man Booker) is no surprise.

Billy and Girl

& Other Stories has received much (deserved) praise for its publication of literature in translation, but it should not be forgotten that two of its most successful novels were originally written in English. I have already covered the story behind the eventual publication of Helen Dewitt’s Lightning Rods; another writer whom & Other Stories have returned to the forefront of discerning reader’s minds is Deborah Levy. Her short-listing for the Booker Prize with Swimming Home has been followed by the appearance of a volume of short stories (Black Vodka) and an essay (Things I Don’t Want to Know). Yet, until Swimming Home appeared in 2011, Levy had not published a novel in the UK since Billy and Girl in 1996.

Billy and Girl is about little more than Billy and Girl, two teenagers trapped in their own narrow world. Is their mother dead? Is their father dead? Even their identity as orphans is questionable. Every so often Girl performs a “mom check”, picking a middle-aged woman at random to tell her, “Billy is quite well but not all that well, thank you, and I am as you see me.”

“I know it’s crazy but sometimes I think one day Girl will really find her. Mom will come to the door and Girl will know… We think Dad died horribly. But we’re not completely sure. He might have survived the fire.”

They fantasise about escape to America and attempt to fund this by robbing the Basket Only till at FreezerWorld with the help of Girl’s ‘double’ Louise. (Louise, who shares Girl’s real name, is a kind of alternate version of her, stuck in a dead end job with a no-account boyfriend, yet somehow happier). Unfortunately the £600 they steal is not the life-changing amount they hoped for and, as Billy points out, they would feel just as out of place on the other side of the Atlantic:

“Poor Girl. I mean, can you see her scrawny, white-bread English thighs lazing with the Californian beach girls.”

The robbery does, however, lead to a chain of events that will unravel much of the mystery around their parents’ fate.

Despite its subject matter, do not approach Billy and Girl expecting a slice of grim realism. Levy hovers above her characters with a kind of detached cruelty. Billy’s friend, Raj, talks of the “Stupid Club”, a group of locals who use his shop to debate the issues of the day:

“They stand in a huddle by the fridge pretending to buy a packet of sugar, discussing why it is that some people wash dishes and then don’t think to rinse them.”

Levy’s view of her own characters, at times, is not so far removed. The novel is also not without elements of the surreal: the taxi cabs which fall apart; the God-like voice of FreezerWorld; Billy’s vision of himself as an actor in America – a sex scene in a shower where he refuses to remove his anorak. In all this she is a little like Muriel Spark, though Spark rarely turned her caustic vision on the poor. Whether this is to your taste or not will probably decide your reaction to the novel, but Levy is certainly a writer who deserves some notice. She has spoken before about the fate of novelists whose work falls out of print:

“Yes, being out of print is like a voice that has kind of been snuffed out. When I have finished my next novel and it makes its way into the world, so I hope will the backlist. What I don’t want to happen to me is that thing that happens to so many Women — it’s as if we burst out of the birthday cake without context, history, or past with every book. Better to have body of work than a body covered in chocolate and cream… it lasts longer.”

Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography (as Early Levy) and The Unloved are due to be republished next year.

Swimming Home

It’s a joy to find Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home on the Man Booker longlist, not because I had marked it down as one of the books of the year (I hadn’t read it before the list was announced, though had got as far as owning it), but because Levy seems to be a genuinely interesting writer who has been working below the radar (okay, my radar) for a number of years now (first novel: 1986)who has teamed up with an exciting new publisher to produce something that deserves the wider attention. To put it another way, she’s neither an established name who doesn’t need the publicity or a one hit wonder landed lucky with their first novel.

But this isn’t about Man Booker, it’s about Swimming Home. In many ways, it’s a typically English novel about some nice middle class people who go on holiday (and it goes a bit wrong). There’s a poet (Joe Jacobs) married to a war journalist (Isabel) with their neglected teenage daughter (Nina), sharing a villa with a couple they don’t even like (Mitchell and Laura) with money worries. A retired doctor (Madeleine Sheridan) watches from a nearby balcony. Luckily the back cover (and Tom McCarthy’s introduction) tells us this is subversive (meaning you won’t sympathise with any of the characters) and Levy throws a damaged young woman into the mix, Kitty Finch – even her name suggests she is at war with herself. Finch is there as a result of an obsession (connection she would probably say – she feels his poems are ‘conversations’ with her) with Joe and quickly presents him with a poem of her own she wants him to read. Her entrance is dramatic – her naked body floating in the pool when the holiday-makers arrive – a scene that will be echoed in the novel’s conclusion. Her nudity is used throughout to unsettle.

It seems Isabel allows Kitty to stay in the hope Joe will sleep with her and give her the final excuse she needs to leave him. Her effect, however, is even more profound – she also shares with Joe a history of depression (which he has written about in his poetry) and has recently stopped her medication:

“…his teenaged years had been tranquilised into a one-season pharmaceutical mist. Or as he had suggested in his most famous poem, now translated into twenty-three languages: a bad fairy made a deal with me, ‘give me your history and I will give you something to take it away.’”

As well as asserting the novel’s subversive tag, the blurb also claims it provides ‘a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people.’ If by ‘merciless’ it means that all the characters are there to be laughed at, then that is certainly true and for those who like their humour cruel (sorry, dark) there is plenty to be had here. The characters, however, veer too much towards satire to reveal much about the nature of depression. If not satirical, Joe’s history (parents killed in the Holocaust) seems a lazy reason to explain his unhappiness; similarly the influence of numerous war zones on Isabel seems phoned in from other novels. Conversely, Kitty’s background in botany seems to be an attempt to add a veneer of character onto her madness. Her effect on Joe is largely ‘explained’ through gaps in the narrative.

Having said that, the novel is skilfully written, with Levy slipping from character to character and unsettling the reader the way the characters feel unsettled (‘FFF,’ as Joe would say). It is also tightly structured and reads lightly like a comedy of manners, keeping its darker side largely hidden until the reader looks back – the very thing the novel warns against.