to all those of you who have lost someone you love recently.
32. Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid
This has had mixed reviews here but I liked it a lot. A confident first novel with thoughtfulness and subtlety below the swagger. The opening scene, in which Emira, a young black woman, is challenged by security while shopping with a white child who she is babysitting, has rightly been much admired and discussed. It's a clever set-up, believable, with subtle details that point to lived experience (when Emira first spots the middle-aged woman who will report her to the security guard, she is glad to see her - this woman is a mother, she thinks, she will understand how difficult it is to entertain a cranky child in a public space). The book then goes on to explore the relationship between Emira, who is coasting in her job, worrying about access to medical insurance but unable to find a career that feels right for her, and Alix, her employer, who is the epitome of a privileged white woman, wonderfully pretentious and blind to how obnoxious she is, but with enough recognisable human frailties that you can't help feeling some sympathy. Reid is good at finding ambivalence, and tension in unexpected places - Alix and her husband are desperate to frame their support of Emira as being anti-racist; Emira (while wearily recognising that, of course, the incident in the supermarket was a racist one) is frustrated, sometimes simply uninterested, in discussing race. Class, wealth, faux-feminism - these things also run through the relationships in the book and treated with a similarly sharp eye. I loved the attention to detail - the significance in the way the two women decorate their homes, the music they listen to, the words they use when talking to their friends. These make the book funny, interesting and real as well as thought-provoking.
33. The Years, Annie Ernaux
I heard of Ernaux via this thread (thank you) so grabbed this when I saw it on the library e-book catalogue. It's a really interesting and unique project - sort of a memoir, sort of autofiction, but a memoir of society and not just the individual. It covers life in France from just after WW2 up to 2006, following the path of a woman's life (this is Ernaux, but she writes of herself impersonally, as "she", describing herself in photos as though she is a stranger) but more often talking of a social group referred to as "we" *:
Everything seemed possible. Everything was novel. We observed the four Communist ministers with curiousity, as we would exotic species, amazed that they didn't look Soviet or speak with the accents of Marchais or Lajoinie. We were moved to see members of the National Assembly sporting pipes and goatees, like students from the sixties. The air seemed lighter, life more youthful. Certain words and turns of phrase were coming back, like 'bourgeoisie' and 'social class'. Language ran riot. On the road to holidays, we listened at full volume to Iron Maiden tapes, the adventures of David Grosexe on Carbone 14, and felt as if a new time were opening up before us.
Ernaux talks of collective experience, collective emotional responses; she doesn't set out who the "we" is, and it shifts - sometimes "we" is women, sometimes it's teachers, sometimes it's middle-class white French people. Sometimes she seems to be throwing her arms around all of her compatriots, at others it's clear that she is defining herself as part of a tight-knit group with certain attitudes or experiences, apart from other sections of society. The book takes in the sweep of post-war history - politics, colonialism, technology, feminism, terrorism, culture wars - but also, as in the above extract, catches on tiny details - advertising jingles, funny turns of phrase, jokes from popular TV shows. As an English person much younger than Ernaux, I decided not to Google everything that was unfamiliar to me (who are Marchais and Lajoinie? Iron Maiden I know, but who is David Grosexe and what is Carbone 14?) - there are few footnotes and I'm not sure why those particular items were chosen for explanation when the whole book is stuffed with references to obscure bits of Frenchness.
For me, this was a book that I admired (hugely) rather than enjoyed. It's short but incredibly dense; it feels like a shining, original, cultural achievement but I didn't find it easy to read, although I am glad to have had the experience.
- In the original French, I believe that Ernaux uses the impersonal singular "on", which translates to "one" in English ("One observed the four Communist ministers") - it's hard to translate though as the French use that impersonal voice a lot more than the English do, and it sounds natural in French while in English it sounds very mannered. The translation, by Alison Strayer, seems to me to be very good, and has been praised by critics - I haven't read the original French but the English prose flows naturally and with a poetic authenticity which suggests a skilful translation.