#FrenchFebruary and #ReadIndies: Cloé Mehdi

Cloé Mehdi: Nothing Is Lost (Rien ne se perd), transl. Howard Curtis, Europa Editions, 2023.

Born near Lyon and currently living in Marseille, Mehdi was only 24 years old when she wrote this, her second novel, which won several notable prizes in France. It is set in the Parisian banlieue, with which the author seems equally familiar, at least judging by her essay written about Fleury-Mérogis, a southern suburb of Paris which is home to the largest prison in France (and Europe), a jail that is a hotbed of Islamist radicalisation.

This is an unapologetically political, even militant novel: it addresses very dark themes (police brutality, social injustice, poverty, mental illnesses and how they are treated, murder, suicide, parental neglect). The humour, if we can describe it as such, is of a cynical variety as voiced by the precocious and world-weary narrator Mattia. At just eleven years old, Mattia has already experienced more than his share of trouble: his father’s mental health problems and subsequent suicide, his sister running away and his mother ‘gave him away’, unable to cope with him after his own attempt to commit suicide aged seven. He is the ward of the eminently unsuitable Zé, himself only 24, who comes from a wealthy white family, but has gone ‘down’ in the world, overcome by guilt since he was accused of killing a classmate at high school, works as a nightwatchman at a supermarket, recites French poets non-stop and forgets to pick Mattia up from school, and tries desperately to keep his girlfriend Gabrielle from committing suicide.

Mattia is bored in school, wary of grown-ups and the authorities, but things get worse when graffiti start appearing, demanding justice for Said, a young teen killed in a police identity check gone wrong. The case happened fifteen years ago and the policeman who beat up Said was acquitted, but it appears that Mattia’s family was somehow involved in what happened then, before he was even born.

This is not really a mystery or suspense story, but more of a relentless portrayal of contemporary French society at the margins, in the vein of the films La Haine or Bande de filles. It also reminded me of Jérôme Leroy’s Little Rebel in its mix of anger and black humour, or the documentaries and novels of Karim Miské set in the 19th arrondisement of Paris. The voice of the eleven-year-old does not always ring true – although he has had to grow faster than others, the language and concepts he uses are too mature and articulate for his age. Some of his outbursts are age-appropriate and ring true, while others are less successful.

When I was small, I thought grown-ups never cried. I realized later that they hide in order to do so. Now I’ve stopped trusting them. I’ve learned to look beyond what they agree to show me, because grown-ups keep the most important things to themselves.

I have a conjugation test tomorrow. How fortunate that someone invented the imperfect subjunctive to distract us from how lousy things really are!

The misfortunes heaped upon our main protagonist can feel almost manipulative at times, to provoke our pity. However, the novel succeeds best in its quieter moments, when there is less commentary attached to the observations of everyday life. For example, there is a scene where the crowds are rioting in response to the acquittal of the police officer against a backdrop of a poster at the bus stop advertising the perfume ‘La vie est belle (Life is beautiful)’.

Some might say that the author tries to work too much into the novel: race and deprivation and redevelopment (the blocks of flats are being torn down and the area is being gentrified), as well as mental health issues. The truth is that all of these problems often coexist and aggravate each other. No wonder Mattia feels that mental breakdown is inevitable, particularly if you have a family history of it. The author is scathing about the treatment of patients experiencing suicidal tendencies or other mental health conditions.

Gradually, the treatments worked. A nameless fog in your head. After that, the idea of escaping or dying was a long way from your daily concerns. As long as you could drink a cup of coffee without spilling it on your pajamas… And so it went on, until they decided you could leave. Free at last, but on borrowed time. Until the next breakdown and the next spell in hopsital. Thanks to them, you were again ready to live in society. You were normal. Were you happy? Nobody cared about that. The important thing was to make you capable of living outside, no matter in what state. No matter if the world around you hadn’t changed. They said it was up to you to adapt. They haven’t yet invented antipsychotics that can modify reality.

This was a brutal if somewhat messy read (the revenge narrative gets a bit bogged down, for example). I was glad to have read it – it feels like a necessary slice of urban life that we need to be aware of – and I read it quite quickly, but it left me feeling there is not much hope for any of the characters involved.

Europa Editions is an independent publisher of quality fiction in translation (I am particularly in love with their Europa World Noir series), so I can link my review once again to the #ReadIndies initiative.

Winding Down and Wrapping Up (4)

Just when I thought the bad summer months had passed and I was about to turn things around with a quiet writing holiday at last… things continued to not work out according to hopes and plans. However, this did lead to some major reading therapy, so the year finished strong at least in that respect.

My second brush with Covid led once again to a weakened immune system, and thus infections with all the viruses life could throw at me, plus more severe symptoms as soon as I caught something for the rest of the autumn.

The week-long October holiday in the beautiful Yorkshire countryside would have been the perfect rest, combining creativity with long walks and visits to Shibden Hall and Hebden Bridge… but alas, I was plagued by a vicious migraine and nausea for most of my stay there, and could barely make it out of bed. I hobbled down to Slaithwaite one morning, and managed to translate about 3000 words, but that was all I had to show for my much longed-for writing retreat.

Things got worse when I came back home. My younger son, whose nickname used to be the Duracell Bunny for his endless energy and sunny disposition, which made him a firm favourite whenever we visited family back in Greece or Romania, suddenly admitted he was deeply depressed and expressed suicidal thoughts.

I can take any amount of bad things happening to me, but bad things happening to my loved ones are much harder to face. I’ve spent these past few months trying to reassure him, get help, keep talking to him without becoming the pushy, prying mum… Above all, find a way to kickstart his engine and reawaken his joie de vivre and natural curiosity. Although I’ve experienced similar feelings myself in the past, although I have been a trained volunteer for the Samaritans, it’s horrible to see how all that becomes inconsequential when it’s your own child. It’s like treading on eggshells all the time. I am aware that it’s not a situation that can be fixed quickly or fully, so we take each day as it comes. I also feel very alone in all of this, as he won’t allow me to mention his fears and depression to his father or brother (for good reason, I suspect, as his father was very dismissive and unhelpful when I was depressed). Luckily, his school has been very supportive and we are collaborating on this quite well. But he has his A Levels this year, so things are… complicated.

Given the emotional and physical lows of that month, my reading was very escapist and not entirely memorable. The crime book I enjoyed most was The Shadows of Men by Abir Mukherjee, the latest book in his delectable series set in pre-independence India, and I probably related a little too much with the treacherous middle-aged academic in Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (not pictured above because I like neither the US nor the UK cover).

Winter in Sokcho and Mateiu Caragiale were perhaps rather melancholy choices for the month, but they were both beautifully written – at opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum, simple and unadorned to ornate and baroque. However, I have to admit it was a struggle to read Diamela Eltit’s Never Did the Fire during this period, because of the grim subject matter, and I might not have been able to finish it if I’d not had Daniel Hahn’s translation diary alongside it. And, much as I love Marlen Haushofer’s writing style, her novella The Loft or her biography were not exactly light reading matter either. Luckily, my other reading choices for German Literature Month were somewhat lighter: Isabel Bogdan’s The Peacock was delightfully farcical but not silly, while Franz Schuh’s Laughing and Dying may sound grim but is actually a collection of essays and anecdotes, poems and little plays exploring what it means to be Viennese (review to follow in the Austrian Riveter in early 2023).

In November, my older son came home for what was going to be a delightful week-long stay to impress us with his newfound cooking and cleaning skills. However, his sore throat and cough got worse, morphed into glandular fever and ended up requiring multiple calls to NHS 111, emergency out-of-hours service and finally the A&E at hospital. He passed on at least part of the virus to us two as well, so November passed by in an interminable blur of collective ill health.

Perhaps not the best backdrop to read challenging journeys through someone’s convoluted brain and memories, such as Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu or Javier Marias’ trilogy Your Face Tomorrow (which I’ve been reading at the rate of one a month, and still have to review). Even the speculative crime novel In the Blink of an Eye by Jo Callaghan, fascinating though it was as a premise (who is less biased and better able to solve a case, a live detective or an AI one?), had a theme of suicide and ill health, so was not quite as escapist as I’d hoped.

However, December dawned more hopeful: a lovely trip to Newcastle Noir with two of our Corylus authors, Tony Mott from the prettiest town in Romania, Brașov, and Óskar Guðmundsson from Iceland. In celebration, I read several good crime novels to end the year: Ian Rankin’s latest, featuring a retired but still very rebellious Rebus, Trevor Wood’s first in a trilogy featuring an ‘invisible’ homeless man solving crimes he witnesses on the streets, and Keigo Higashino’s entertaining mix of police procedural and psychological depth.

Older son recovered fully and enjoyed a ski trip in France, coming back full of nostalgic stories about French food and books, pistes we had both loved, and oodles of Swiss chocolate (he flew via Geneva). I am looking forward to some cosy film-watching with both of them (we started with Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio yesterday, on the first day of holidays), lots of reading, favourite Christmassy foods… and will ignore gas bills, ongoing concerns about family members, several substantial literary and translation rejections, or my own precarious health.

Hope really does spring eternal – and in 2023 I resolve to be more physically active, take better care of myself as well as others, and not take on too many additional projects.

I will probably post a few more book reviews between Christmas and New Year, but I will sign off for a few days (other than the usual Friday Fun post) and may your holiday period be as unstressful as possible!

#YoungWriterAward: Inferno by Catherine Cho

I’ve now finished reading all of the shortlisted titles for the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, but for most of the month the day job has been so demanding that I haven’t had time to review any beyond the first one I read. So you can expect a flurry of reviews coming up between now and the end of the month, as we prepare to announce the Shadow Panel winner on the 3rd of December. The judges will announce their winner on the 10th of December.

Catherine Cho’s Inferno is a memoir (it says so on the title page, as if it would be any less powerful if it were fiction). It is an account of the post-partum psychosis that the author experienced shortly after the birth of her first child, while she was visiting her family in the States together with her English husband and their baby son. The experience was so severe, her mental state so profoundly altered, that she ended up being hospitalised in an involuntary psych ward.

The book moves between scenes from the ward, references to the author’s Korean family traditions and stories, a doomed previous relationship, and the story of how she fell in love with her husband, their marriage and their road trip across the States. At first I found these switches of perspective unnerving, even irritating, but then I realised that Cho is trying to make sense of something that struck her so suddenly and seemingly made no sense at all.

Her psychotic brain was seeing patterns where there were none, but now she wants to recollect those moments at a distance, calmly, and see if there was any rhyme or reason to it.

There are certainly elements of Girl, Interrupted or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the ward scenes, but it’s the passages of lyrical, almost manic poetic intensity that try to replicate the ‘brain on fire’ phenomenon of psychosis which I found particularly moving. I have seldom seen the dangerous temptation of allowing oneself to sink into the abyss described so well (although Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Leonora Carrington’s Down Below do come to mind).

It was strangely exhilarating to see these patterns, like putting together a story when there were only pieces before. And through my dread and my fear, I saw the beauty in them, the patterns in the universe. I could tell it was dangerous, this raw energy, this coursing feeling, and for a moment, I wished I could tumble in, tumble into the madness. I felt like I’d caught a glimpse of another dimension, of the void, of the truth, of possibility. This feeling was beautiful; it was terrifying. I would never be able to harness it, I knew, I would never be able to control it. I felt like Icarus, gaspin in what was awesome, transcending fear.

This is undeniably an extremely brave, raw and hard-hitting book, so honest that it almost flays the skin off the reader. I cannot help wondering how her husband, but above all her son will feel in the coming years to see these painful moments openly exposed. Does the ‘sharing the experience so that others can see they are not alone in feeling it’ justify this? Or is it a work written as catharsis? Or perhaps the author is trying to untangle the threads, understand the reasons behind this situation and perhaps cast a protective spell, to ensure that this won’t happen again?

In an attempt to be all these things and more, although I loved individual parts of the book, I have to admit that the parts did not really coalesce into a fully satisfactory whole for me.

Whatever its intent, it is certainly a memorable exploration of identity, love and family, one that I am not likely to forget in a hurry… but also one that I had to read in small chunks, to prevent overdosing. I’d perhaps also add, since the title for the award is Young Writer of the Year, that, while Exciting Times did feel like it was written by a young person, Inferno gave the impression of a much older, wiser author.

Too Close for Comfort: Three Quick Reviews

All three of these recently read books were a little too close to home for me: on a personal, social or political level. Absolutely compelling reading, although each one required some coffee and cake or deep breathing breaks.

Rodrigo de Souza Leao: All Dogs are Blue (transl. Zoe Perry and Stefan Tobler)

This was part of my Brazilians in August personal challenge, the only man who sneaked onto my list of Brazilian authors in translation. Much like Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, it gives you an insight into what it must feel like to be deeply depressed, paranoid and schizophrenic. Regardless of diagnostic, the morbidly obese narrator finds himself in an asylum in Rio. He believes he has swallowed a chip that makes him behave out of character and do things he doesn’t want to do. His descriptions of life both inside and outside the asylum, in all its madcap noise and grossness, are hilarious. Knowing that the author himself suffered from mental health problems and died at a young age, soon after the publication of this book, gives a bitter edge to the comedy. It is the black humour of despair, and it’s not surprising that his chosen fantasy chums are Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

To read this book is to abandon yourself to its rhythm and let its waves overpower you. It’s not a pleasant experience, it tosses you about and can feel like drowning at times.

I swallowed a chip. I swallowed a cricket. What else is left to devour in this world? Carnival only wears the colours of short-lived happiness. Dealing with lunatics or with normal people: what’s the difference? What is reality? How many pieces of wood do you need to make that canoe? How many mortars do you need to sink that boat?

But Souza Leao is very clever and also has a poet’s felicity of expression: he tosses a throwaway line into the mix that you simply have to stop and wonder over.

I left the hotel and went to the bus station. I was possessed by a fertile spirit of modern madness, one that had helped twentieth-century poetry many times and had put contemporary literature in its rightful place. My persecution complex had reached the pinnacle of its glory.

Deborah Levy: The Cost of Living

At the age of fifty, Levy leaves her marriage and makes a new life for herself and her children. This slim volume is the story of her reinvention, a sort of ‘swimming home’, finding herself and her purpose, while also dealing with the irritating, intractable, unforgiving day to day. As a woman, mother and writer who is struggling with many of the same things, it has simply meant so much to me. It’s a book I’ve filled up with post-its and shall be returning to again and again. It is also very insightful into gender relations and often feels like she has been inhabiting my head and heart. Here are just a few favourite quotes:

At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realized I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.

I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are. I am not sure I have often witnessed love that achieves all of these things, so perhaps this ideal is fated to be phantom.

To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman.

Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then mock her for having no dreams? As the vintage story goes, it is the father who is the hero and the dreamer. He detaches himself from the pitiful needs of his women and children and strides out into the world to do his thing. He is expected to be himself. When he returns to the home that our mothers have made for us… he tells us some of what he has seen in his world. We give him an edited version of the living we do every day. Our mothers live with us in this living and we blame her for everything because she is near by.

Sinclair Lewis: It Can’t Happen Here

A late entry to my Americans in June challenge. Moving from the personal and gendered to the more purely political, this book is just as painful as the other two. It was written in 1935 as a satire and a warning against the rise of populists and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin in what must have seemed very frightening end of world times. (Hence the rise of dystopian fiction during that period, so similar to our own.)

A narcissistic, rude, almost illiterate, anti-immigrant, fear-mongering demagogue Buzz Windrip promises to make America proud and prosperous once more and wins the presidential election. The results are predictable but even more dire than the peace-loving newspaper editor Doremus Jessup had feared. His original ‘wait and see’ policy, the complacency of the ‘it can’t happen here’ type of those around him soon leads to the regime slipping ever more deeply into disturbing authoritarianism.

At first, Doremus and his family seem comfortable and protected, nobody seems to share his discomfort at the election of Buzz as president, and he has a bit of tantrum-ridden stomping off ‘fine then, don’t listen to me’ attitude that I can understand all too well.

All right. Hell with this country, if it’s like that. All these years I’ve worked – and I never did want to be on all these committees and boards and charity drives! – and don’t they look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak off to an ivory tower – or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory – and read everything I’ve been too busy to read.

But soon things go beyond a joke and beyond mere discomfort. There is no more sitting on the fence or ignoring the way the country is heading. It’s no longer about compromise and self-censorship, very soon it turns into attempting to escape, being tortured and even killed.

Interestingly enough, Buzz is a Democrat and originally runs on a socialist platform, showing that any ideology can be taken to extremes and abused. An absolutely chilling novel, sadly possibly more topical now than at any other time since the Second World War.

World Mental Health Day: Mental Health in Fiction

Today is World Mental Health Day. Call me morbid, but I’ve always been fascinated by mental health issues both in real life and in fiction. I seem to have quite a few friends with different mental health conditions, have suffered from depression on-and-off myself and have always read research papers on the topic. For a while, I was tempted to become a psychiatrist, except I couldn’t face going for so many years to medical school.

I find the self-help books often surprisingly unhelpful, and it’s a bit hit and miss with memoirs. I appreciate the honesty and find them inspiring in small doses. But, somehow, fiction describes it best – and there certainly is no shortage of such fictional treatments (pardon the pun). From Dostoevsky’s Idiot (who really only suffers from epilepsy and a good heart) to that well-known Victorian disease, hysteria in women, in The Yellow Wallpaper, from the graphic descriptions of electro-shock therapy in The Bell Jar to the horrific wards in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it seems that we are endlessly fascinated by the unpredictability of the human mind.

Now that I’m out of the danger zone myself, I’ve read more books on this topic in recent months. Books that I might have avoided 18 months ago. Although never explicitly diagnosed, in Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill we probably encounter (spoiler alert!) schizophrenia or paranoia, and various other conditions in the secondary characters. Meanwhile, Zero by Gine Cornelia Pedersen describes a horrific slo-mo fall into depression and self-destruction – exact diagnosis is not always possible or useful.

The most recent book I read on this topic also has a woman struggling with mental health issues (in all three of these books, it is the woman who suffers – hmmm), namely The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer. This was also my contribution to the #NYRBFortnight. [There is another excellent book published by NYRB which relates to this subject and which I might tackle next: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a non-fiction book by psychologist Milton Rokeach, who brought together three paranoid schizophrenics who each believed they were Jesus Christ.]

The unnamed narrator of the the Mortimer novel (or named only as Mrs Armitage, thus being denied of any identity of her own that does not relate to hear role as daughter, mother or wife) is a woman who can’t stop getting married and having children. We never quite find out the exact number of her brood, nor any of their names, except for the oldest daughter Dinah. We do know that she is in love or believes she is in love with Jake, her current (fourth) husband, who has become a successful and well-paid film director. But clearly there is something missing in her life, a gap that she tries to fill through babies, although she is somewhat ambivalent about them once they are there. They tear her apart with their ceaseless demands, yet she clearly would do anything for them.

She sees a therapist but finds it less than useful (he wants to talk about her previous husbands and her father, which she doesn’t believe to be relevant). Most of the book is constructed on dialogue, which prove to be hugely revealing of character.

“Do you like children, Mrs. Armitage?”
“How can I answer such a question?”
“Could it be a question that you don’t wish to answer?”
“I thought I was supposed to lie on a couch and you wouldn’t say a word. It’s like the inquisition or something. Are you trying to make me feel I’m wrong? Because I do that for myself.”
“Do you think it would be wrong not to like children?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Yes, I think so.”
“Why?”
“Because children don’t do you any harm.”

Except, of course, indirectly they do. A year before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, Mrs Armitage expresses all the boredom and frustration, being slowly stifled by domesticity and colluding (sometimes quite happily, sometimes feeling she has no choice) in her own oppression. She is given some ‘happy pills’ but still has a breakdown in the linen department at Harrods. Her husband, the insufferably self-absorbed Jake, convinces her to have an abortion and sterilisation, but she discovers almost immediately afterwards that he has been having an affair with an actress. This was one of the most angry and poignant parts of the story and I was devastated to hear that it was autobiographical. But with what admirable control Mortimer takes real life and transforms it into fiction!

Penelope Mortimer, from the National Portrait Gallery.

This all sounds terribly depressing, but the book refuses to be self-indulgent and self-pitying. Instead, it is just the right proportion of fierce and funny, ironic and devastating. Reading it can feel a bit surreal, particularly at the beginning, when you wonder just why the heroine makes so many marriages and children. I particularly enjoyed the  pitch-perfect non sequiturs, whenever Mrs Armitage replies to anyone. She refuses to allow herself to be defined or questioned or pinned down by her victim. She refuses to be a victim, although she sometimes seems in danger of getting crushed by raw emotions. Her revenge is often sly, indirect, simply by ridiculing the men in her life. A woman’s weapons at a time when there were few other weapons available. But at other times, she explicitly calls out for women to rebel… although that letter (significantly) never gets sent. Still, this passage resonated particularly at this moment in time:

You have a vote, Mrs Evans. Now, why don’t you take advantage of it? I have a vote. Really, anyone would think that the emancipation of women had never happened. Dear Mrs Evans, let us march together to our local headquarters and protest in no uncertain terms. Let us put forward our proposals, compile our facts, present our case, demand our rights. The men – they are logical, brave, humanitarian, creative, heroic – the men are sneering at us. How the insults fly. You hear what they are saying, as we run the gauntlet between womb and tomb? ‘Stop trying to be a man! Stop being such a bloody woman! You’re too strong! you’re too weak! Get out! Come back…’ When we were young, we said the hell with it and used our breasts as shields. But the tears fall so easy when they take away love.

Peter Finch kisses Anne Bancroft on the forehead in a scene from the film ‘The Pumpkin Eater’, 1964. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)

If this be insanity, then perhaps all women (at that time) were insane. To me, it seems like a perfectly reasonable response to difficult external circumstances. Yet, although it encapsulates a certain time period, it also feels very modern (and also quite American, so that I often was startled when I came across references to London in the text). Perhaps I say American because it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s home life. I think the two of them would have got along very well.

#WITMonth: Zero by Gine Cornelia Pedersen

One of the privileges of working for a journal for world literature like Asymptote is that I get to know some of the best translators, as well as getting an early peek at some of the things they are working on. When Rosie Hedger, one of the most promising young translators from Norwegian (she has also translated that wonderfully claustrophobic novel The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn), mentioned that she was unsure about the reception her most recent translation would have, because it is bold and mad, I was eager to read it. Additionally, it is published by Nordisk Books, whose previous publication Love/War was equally unusual but intriguing. So thank you very much to Rosie for sending me a copy of the book, but you know me well enough by now to realise that this has in no way swayed me to write positive stuff about it if I didn’t like it.

Luckily, I did like it! In fact, I was so captivated by it, that I read it in a couple of breathless hours sitting in my back garden at the weekend. It is very quick to read, written in something resembling a free verse style (short line breaks), but it’s certainly not an easy read. The unnamed narrator, a young girl with mental health problems, does horrible things to others and to herself; meanwhile, horrible things are done to her too. It is the machine-gun approach to storytelling, or one long, angry howl.

There are quite a few accounts of people suffering from mental health problems in literature, some of them very well-known, such as Girl, Interrupted, The Bell Jar, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, others far less so: Down Below by Leonora Carrington or Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table. What they all have in common is a very unflattering perspective on daily life in a mental asylum, which is certainly present in this book too. However, all of the other books are written retrospectively, while Zero is written in first person, present tense, like a diary. It feels like speleology, like visiting the dark insides of someone’s ‘defective’ head. We witness each thought as it arises, often contradicting the previous sentence, all the jumps and starts and sudden turns. It can feel like trying to navigate a small boat in very rough seas and my advice would be to just give up navigation and allow yourself to be carried away by the monster waves.

The narrator is entirely self-absorbed. Like any child or adolescent she believes the world revolves around her. And she maintains this belief even as she grows up. Everyone else is described in relation to her. Alcohol, drugs, sex, friendships are consumed as casually as the cigarettes she half-smokes. Her self-hatred and doubt are so all-encompassing that they extend to anyone who loves her and believes in her. She pushes away her mother, her boyfriends, her girlfriend. How can they possibly love someone as screwed up and worthless as herself – that must make them either deceitful or worthless.

Her real problem is that she is so thin-skinned that she has no skin left at all, or as she puts it early on: ‘I absorb everything unfiltered’. At times you want to rush in and protect her, but then her self-destructive gene kicks in and you want to slap her and tell her to get a grip on herself.

I’m lucky to be alive, the doctors say

They’re idiots, every last one of them

They don’t realise that I’m actually very unlucky to be alive

There is no sugar-coating, no attempt at self-justification or excuses in this ‘punk rock’ saga. A doctor tells her that she has too much of the victim mentality, that she is feeling too sorry for herself and refusing to accept any responsibility. Part of the narrator understands and agrees with that, but then the rebellious voice starts shouting and she is unable to remonstrate with her.

Author photo, credit Pernille Marie Walwik.

You might ask yourself how much of this is autobiographical, since the narrator aspires to be an actor, and the author is best known for her acting role in a Norwegian TV series, but it doesn’t really matter. This is the rawest, most believable account of schizophrenia that I have ever come across (at least I assume it is schizophrenia, I’m not a trained doctor, but I’ve had a couple of friends with this affliction). The translation does an excellent job of capturing the fragmented, jolting nature of the work, the repetition, the almost incantatory poetry of it, the breathless present tense. I’m not surprised this won the Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award in 2013 – it is a remarkable and original piece of work.

 

Sarah Moss: Signs for Lost Children

Actually, I wanted to read the latest book by Sarah Moss The Tidal Zone, but my local library did not have it. Then I thought her non-fiction book about living in Iceland might be of interest, or her book about the clash between motherhood and an academic career Night Waking. But guess what? They didn’t have those either, so I picked up Signs for Lost Children instead, looked at the blurb and thought: pioneering women in medicine? Meiji Japan? hmmm, intriguing topics…

That’s what is so amazing about Sarah Moss: every single one of her books is very different and yet each one sounds fascinating in its own right. There are far too few writers nowadays who can surprise without disappointing you from book to book.

Signs for Lost Children is a gendered history of discovery. Tom and Ally, the newly married couple at the start of the book, discover new worlds, both outside and within the relatively narrow confines of Victorian society. They also go on intense personal journeys, are forever changed and may not find their way back to one another. Just a few weeks after getting married, Tom sets off to a rapidly modernising Japan to build lighthouses, while Ally stays behind in Cornwall to work in a women’s asylum.

At first the scrupulously alternating chapters between his voice and her voice, Japan and England, felt somewhat belaboured, especially since there was a bit of time lag between them (the time it takes for a letter to travel between the two countries by ship, perhaps). Later on, I began to appreciate the parallel structure: it was like watching a tree grow into two separate trunks, yawning apart.

The chapters on Japan were, of course, a delight for anyone who has ever visited Japan, but had a lot to say about British Empire as well (or present-day expats in exotic locations). The observations about Western blindness to Japanese nuance and traditions are spot-on, and the firm insistence that the Japanese should adapt themselves to Western standards, for example, that their chefs should cook English meals (which they slaughter mercilessly) is very funny.

Mrs Senhouse apologises again for the dinner. It is so hard to explain to Japanese servants what is required.

Tom sets down his fork. The food indeed requires apology. ‘Perhaps a Japanese cook would be more competent in preparing Japanese food?’

She wrinkles her nose. ‘It is the slimy things one cannot abide. Rice, of course, and clear soup, but I cannot expect Mr Senhouse to do a day’s work on such pauper food.

He thinks of the jinrikisha men, and the men who carried stones up the rocks for the lighthouses, and the men on the mountain farms.

Senhouse is also giving up on what is probably tinned ham cooked in salty brown sauce with some inexplicably gluey vegetable admixture. ‘The Japanese constitution is a mystery.’

Tom himself starts out dreading the tea ceremony and ends up appreciating it, even bringing it back with him to England. Of course, this is Meiji Japan we are talking about, the period when Japan opened up to the rest of the world after several centuries of isolation. They caught up with Western technology remarkably quickly, to the point where they started producing fake traditional goods for the Western visitors to take home as souvenirs.

Meanwhile, Ally begins to suspect that the women who are locked up in the Truro asylum are driven mad by their family life, and find more respite in the hospital itself, despite the harsh conditions there and the unsympathetic nurses.

… if all the women in here who speak of indecent things, who recount endlessly obscene acts and unnatural couplings, are speaking from unhappy experience, then their madness may be perfectly reasonable. May be the inevitable response of a healthy mind to things that should not happen. And if that is the case, then the primary problem is not so much with the minds of some women as with the acts of some men. Older men, almost invariably. Men with power.

Ally herself is susceptible to the anxieties which haunt these women. Growing up with a kindly but absent father focused too much on his own artistic career, a mother who shows more concern and sympathy for the general ills of the world than her own daughter and a sister who committed suicide, she experienced her own nervous breakdown early on. Nevertheless, she pushed herself to find her way as a female doctor in a world which is not quite ready for them yet, where even the most kindly friends and relatives do not understand her need to be working with mad people.

Author photo from Granta Books website.

But will Tom understand her when he returns from Japan? Long-distance relationships are never easy, but in that particular time and place it must have been harder still. The author steers clear of both the saccharine and the bitter in describing the reunion. Will they each, separately or jointly, find that ‘place of healing and hope for the future as well as a distaste for the past’, which Ally is trying to create for her ‘lunatic’ women? The proto-feminist storyline blends seamlessly with the cross-cultural dimension: ultimately, it’s all about keeping an open mind, being curious and forgiving about others.

An elegant novel, with understated prose which nevertheless burns lyrically intense at times. I will certainly be reading more of Sarah Moss … if ever I can find her. (And isn’t that a beautiful cover?)

 

Depression and Breakdown: in Fiction and in Life

Richard Yates: Disturbing the Peace

This is the world of Mad Men: 1960s New York and advertising, men earning enough money to support their families whilst feeling strangely alienated from them, trying to find some deeper meaning and purpose, but not quite succeeding. Except, of course, Richard Yates was the original and the writers of Mad Men have been influenced by him. This is not as moving a book as Revolutionary Road, possibly because it only presents one man’s point of view, nor is it as subtle, but it’s nevertheless a masterly description of a disturbed psyche who refuses to help himself.

Yates is one of the best authors to scrape away the thin veneer of comfortable, civilised, well-adjusted lifestyles and expose the despair and sense of emptiness lying beneath. Our main protagonist John Wilder was not wildly successful at school and university, but has made a reasonable career for himself in selling advertising space. One night, on his way back home from a business trip to Chicago, he has a nervous breakdown and gets sent to Bellevue mental hospital for a few days, where he feels like the only sane person in a sea of madness.

Richard Yates, from babelio.com

This experience marks him profoundly, but it estranges him further from his wife Janice (who craves nothing more than normality) and his sulky pre-teen son. His psychotherapy sessions are a joke, he goes to AA meetings without any intention of giving up his drinking and he embarks on an affair with a young girl, Pamela, believing she will help him to reinvent himself and resurrect his childhood dream of becoming a film producer. Needless to say, everyhing he touches turns to rot. There is a lengthy impressionistic scene describing John’s descent into paranoia and violence which is chilling, but perhaps even more sinister is the final resignation and incarceration. (Hopefully that’s not a spoiler alert – you just know there’s not going to be a happy ending with a book by Yates.)

John is not the most sympathetic character; at times you may find it hard to even pity him. He is obnoxious, selfish, stubborn and self-pitying. Yet he is also riddled with doubt and lack of self-esteem. He is so obsessed, for instance, about being too short, that he sees even the big moments of American history entirely through his self-centred perspective. Here’s what he has to say about the assassination of JFK:

He felt sympathy for the assassin and he felt he understood the motives. Kennedy had been too young, too rich, too handsome and too lucky; he had embodied elegance and wit and finesse. His murderer had spoken for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance, and John Wilder understood those forces all too well. He almost felt he’d pulled the trigger himself…

Many readers think this is one of the weakest of Yates’ novels: it is true that it feels rather disjointed and episodic. There are some great set pieces and memorable scenes, but jerky transitions. I found it can still be ‘enjoyed’ (if that’s the right word) on its own terms, and it’s this ‘anti-American dream’ stance which makes all of Richard Yates’ work so interesting.

You can’t help feeling that if John Wilder had read Matt Haig: Reasons to Stay Alive he might have found a way of managing his life better. Haig’s book is a very personal description of his own experience with an apparently sudden attack of depression in his twenties and he is careful to explain that each person’s depression is different. Yet it also contains very wise statements about perceptions (and self-perceptions) of depression, brings in other people’s views on finding reasons to keep on going on, raises many important points for a serious debate about mental health.

Anyone who has experienced depression or known someone with depression will find this a very useful and at times quite uplifting book. It is not a self-help book, nor is it a systematic autobiography of the darkest hour and coming out of it. There is quiet humour, but none of the manic energy which spoiled Furiously Happy for me. There are some very well-written scenes that convey just how it feels to try and cope with panic attacks and overwhelming depressive pain.

From matthaig.com

What was most interesting to me was that the author was very sceptical (as I am) of medication and that he found alternative ways of dealing with his depression. I found his conversations between ‘then me’ and ‘now me’ very revealing, while his descriptions of being overly sensitive and anxious spoke to me directly. The only criticism I would have is that perhaps the structure is too loose, it tends to jump around between subjects. But what brilliant subjects can be found here: Things people say to depressives that they don’t say in other life-threatening situations; Things depression says to you; Boys don’t cry and many more, each worthy of a lengthy discussion in its own right.

I’ll close with a couple of quotes out of the many quotable passages in the book, one that links back so well to the Yates novel:

Life is hard. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard. The way people seem to cope is by not thinking about it too much. But some people are not going to be able to do that.

I’m not talking about all that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger stuff. No. That’s simply not true. What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.

Dandelions & Bad Hair Days – how mental health & motherhood woke up the writer in me

Dandelions & Bad Hair Days – how mental health & motherhood woke up the writer in me.

Looking forward to reading this book – the anxiety that dare not speak its name in the competition of upbeat self-deprecation of the school run!