The autobiography of a fictional character, this novel charts the significant periods in the life of one Daisy Goodwill, born in 1905 in rural Manitoba. The novel dedicates one chapter apiece to birth, childhood, marriage, motherhood, etc, right up to (and including) death, which you have to admit is an unorthodox choice for a novel purportedly narrated by the protagonist (though often not in the first person).
Continue reading The Stone Diaries
The heroine of this novel, Sofia, travels with her mother Rose to a coastal Spanish town in order to consult an orthopaedic surgeon about the pain (or is it numbness?) that has resulted in the mother being mostly unable to walk for many years. The father is long since out of the picture, having moved back to his native Greece, married a woman the age of his own daughter, and started a new family. The relationship between mother and daughter is strained, to the point of abusiveness. It seems that, her mother having been under a disability for most of her life, Sofia has been forced to care for Rose in her father’s absence since childhood, and Rose has done everything she can to make it as difficult as possible.
Continue reading Hot Milk
It is 1964, and Eileen lives alone with her verbally abusive alcoholic father in a small town in Massachusetts. Underfed, embittered, and lonely, she has never felt loved or appreciated by anyone, until the arrival of a new colleague, Rebecca, at the (literal) prison where she works. From a vantage point some years in the future, she narrates what she tells us is the last week she spent living the identity with which she was born.
Continue reading Eileen
“Why did Busoni transcribe Bach? How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before?”
So ponders the narrator, Marie, near the end of this long, but never slow, novel. As a child living in Canada, her beloved father, Chinese by birth, committed suicide in Hong Kong in 1989. Not long after, her mother received a letter from the wife of her father’s best friend in China, begging Marie’s mother’s help to smuggle her teenage daughter to Canada. Although the child Marie does not understand the reasons for these events, it is implied that the daughter, Ai-Ming, has been involved somehow in the Tiananmen Square protests. After her arrival Ai-Ming discovers a notebook in Marie’s home filled with elegant Chinese calligraphy, and begins to tell the story of the Book of Records.
Continue reading Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Satire can, without doubt, be the most effective style of writing for drawing attention to political problems that are, objectively, absurd. Of course, the problem is in treading that fine line between taking your satire a step too far, thus allowing your true subject to distance himself* from it, and making it too subtle, thus risking your audience missing the point altogether. It’s not an easy balance to find; for an example of this difficulty, one need look no further than the most famous satire in history, Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal”, following the publication of which many a rich plutocrat expressed unironic moral outrage at the very idea of eating babies.
Continue reading The Sellout
Four young Nigerian brothers, returning from a fishing trip to a forbidden river, encounter a madman, who prophesies that one of them will be murderer, and one of them, victim.
So far, so Sophoclean. In fact, this novel overall is structured not unlike a Classical tragedy. The first few chapters are a bit slow and expository, but once things get going, the prophecy takes on its own life within the family, and each member in turn becomes its victim in his or her own way. There’s an inexorable quality to the plot as it develops, so that the several missed opportunities to avoid disaster (which are perhaps more in the vein of Shakespearean than Greek tragedy) seem both necessary and impossible.
Continue reading The Fishermen
This is probably the best-known of Mitchell’s works, not least because it was made into a film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. It’s a novel comprised of a series of nesting narratives, commencing in the colonial South Pacific, travelling through inter-war Europe, 70s California and futuristic Korea, and reaching a zenith in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, before a decrescendo back down the same path.
Continue reading Cloud Atlas