1. Who They Was, Gabriel Krause
I really disliked this; tedious and frequently deeply unpleasant. Many others, including the booker judges (who longlisted it for the 2020 prize) loved it. I don't know whether I've missed something or if there is a massive case of the Emperor's New Clothes going on here: that because Krause is writing about an overlooked part of society, people see things in his writing that aren't there?
What they describe, what they seem to have seen, is what I would have liked this book to be. This is a work of autofiction about a character called Gabriel Krause whose life aligns closely with that of the author. Born into a family of educated, middle-class Polish immigrants, he is drawn to the street life and gangs of nearby South Kilburn, where he becomes a roadman, thief and drug dealer. At the same time that he's living this life, mugging strangers at knifepoint, robbing other dealers, carrying a gun, he's attending uni and studying for an English Literature degree. Reviewers talk about the code-swapping, about the poetry of the language and the insights that come from the collision of the two worlds.
As I said: I wish. This was what I wanted to find. Instead, there are endless tedious descriptions of Gabriel's movements: he meets his friends, smokes some weed, goes to the chicken shop, mugs someone, changes his clothes, goes to uni, makes a clever remark which everyone admires and which stops the lecturers in their tracks ("Did everyone write down what Gabriel just said?"), has doogy-style sex with a girl who comments on how big his penis is then goes home to cut drugs into packets and get stoned again. His crimes, inevitably, are cruel and violent, but only occasionally interesting. And I can see that this is realistic - most of our lives, whether we're office workers or petty criminals, are repetitive and domestic. But that doesn't make a Booker longlist on its own, does it?
I did see flashes of what other people seem to have seen: those moments where his reading on morality and social rules intersect with his life, where you can see that someone living a gangster life could tell you more about Nietzsche, or Dostoevsky, or Camus, than a dozen middle class university lecturers. But those flashes are rare, as are the moments of introspection and self-reflection. A different balance, with more of that and less of the endless and repetitive "then we went to X's chick's yard and bunned bare cro", and I might have found in this book what others seem to have seen.
Sorry to start with such a bad-tempered review. Onwards and upwards.
Welcome back Satsuki - we missed you.