‘Swanfolk’ by Kristín Ómarsdóttir ***

I have wanted to read Icelandic author Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s work for years now, and I had my eye on the first of her books to be translated into English, the endearingly titled Children in Reindeer Woods.  To my surprise, my library had a copy of her newest work, Swanfolk, which was shortlisted for the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, and has been translated into English by Vala Thorodds. 

The novel opens, quite mesmerisingly, toward the end of March: ‘I came from a county that didn’t exist and lived from birth in its capital, by a blue bay and a violet mountain where slopes were scaled by a verdurous green in summer and in winter were veiled by snow…  On the horizon, the sun curtsied politely like a chorus girl.’  We learn that Elísabet Eva’s parents disappeared when she was just twelve, and she and her brother were raised by their grandmother. 

There are a lot of unusual components to Swanfolk.  The novel is dystopic, and is set in the ‘not-too-distant future’, whilst still holding onto, and examining, some quite old-fashioned societal structures.  Our protagonist is ‘a young spy’ named Elísabet Eva, who enjoys solitude.  She is often found, when not at work at the secretive Special Unit in the Ministry of the Interior, taking long walks around a local lake.  On one such occasion, she sees ‘two creatures emerging from the water, half-human, half-swan.  She follows them through tangles of thickets into a strange new reality.’  When she first sees the Swanfolk, Ómarsdóttir describes them as involved with a myriad of quite ordinary tasks: ‘One creature bounced a fishing line in the water, another washed her hair, others swam the evening rounds like townsfolk milling about in warm summer twilight.  Yet the earth was still frozen underfoot, as befitted the season.’   

When reflecting on what she has seen after she returns home, Elísabet Eva reflects: ‘… I lay down in bed… and doubted everything I had seen.  Surely no one would credit the word of a person who had fallen asleep in a bush.’  She goes on: ‘I was out in the open air, mixed up with a mysterious and strange realm of which few stories existed – certainly none that I had heard, and I was meant to be better informed than most of my countrymen in fundamental matters of human life in the under- and overworlds and all of the worlds between.’ 

The Swanfolk are intelligent, and hold a lot of agency.  One of them tells Elísabet Eva: ‘It’s a strange thing to be half human and miss the other half, to be half swan and miss the other half…  It gives rise to a complicated emotional life.  Sometimes we think like humans even while we feel like birds, think like birds but feel like humans – we are jealous of swans, jealous of humans; despise swans, admire humans.’ 

I found Ómarsdóttir’s prose, and the ideas it conveyed, strange yet compelling, and admired the way in which the author provides a showcase of very unusual perspectives.  The second chapter, for instance, opens: ‘During the night a flower grew in my throat, and by midday it had bloomed.’  Elísabet Eva was a most unusual protagonist; she allowed us into her world, and I was compelled to read her story.  She is perhaps one of the strangest characters I have read about in quite a while; she has an imaginary sister and an imaginary dog, both of whom she sees everywhere.   

Swanfolk is rather dark, in both its tone and subject matter.  This imaginative novel really drew me in, and whilst I did not love it, I admired the author’s writing and the power of Thorodds’ translation.  Ómarsdóttir blurs the lines between realistic and otherworldly, and there is something really quite magical about this strange novel. 

‘Chouette’ by Claire Oshetsky ****

I had been intrigued by Claire Oshetsky’s novel Chouette for months before I requested a copy from my local library. Chouette is described in its blurb as ‘Savage, startling, possessed of a biting humour and wild love… a dark modern fable about mothering an unusual child.’ Various reviews adorning its cover piqued my interest further; they respectively call it ‘a marvel’ (Rumaan Alam), ‘an unforgettable fairy tale’ (Rachel Yoder), and ‘wonderfully disorienting’ (Claire Lombardo).

The novel opens in Sacramento, California, where our protagonist, professional cellist Tiny, finds out about her pregnancy. After a vivid dream, in which she is ‘making tender love with an owl’, she wakes the next morning with ‘talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace.’ She tells her husband that the baby is not his, and that she will give birth to an “owl-baby”, an outsider just like her. In the narrative, Tiny then shifts to addressing everything to her baby, telling her: ‘Your owlness is with you from the very beginning… and on the day that you are born – on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box – I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.’

The owl-baby infiltrates every part of Tiny’s body and mind. During her pregnancy, she says: ‘I begin to understand the nature of my sacrifice… I’m pregnant with an owl-baby. Everyone is a little bit repelled by me. Everyone is a little bit uncomfortable. Everyone can tell that I’m about to enter a world where women sit alone in the silent corners of cafeterias, spoon-feeding their grown children, while others look away.’

When baby Chouette – the French feminine form of the word owl – is born, her father is ‘devastated by her condition and strange appearance’. Chouette will not walk or talk, and ‘lashes out when frightened’, as well as causing chaos when out in public. Despite this, Tiny sees her little daughter as nothing short of perfect. Her husband avoids Chouette more and more, whilst Tiny is drawn closer toward her.

Tiny and her husband, perhaps inevitably, begin to fight over what they feel is right for Chouette. Meanwhile, the growing owl-baby, ‘in her fierce self-possession, her untameable will’, begins to teach Tiny that to be different, and not to meet the expectations of others, is okay. In the sense of a protagonist changing so much following a huge life-event, as becoming a mother is, Oshetsky has created a strangely believable story, despite all of its oddities.

Oshetsky’s writing is thoughtful, and incredibly compelling. There is an otherworldly, shapeshifting quality to the prose. There are some bloody scenes here, delivered in raw, visceral, and animalistic prose. Tiny’s voice is almost a stream-of-consciousness, and she continues to ask herself pertinent questions: ‘Is this what it means to be a mother, then? To be in constant, irrational conflict with one’s own child? To be constantly challenged by the stubborn will of a creature who doesn’t respond to logic or reason, and who always wins?’ Later, she tells her baby: ‘This is motherhood. I ponder it. I ponder the lonely, cruel, relentless obligation of motherhood. I ponder the loving, soft, yielding wonder of motherhood. I ponder the mystery of who you are, little stranger, and who you will become… To habituate myself to the idea of loving you, I say it many times… It was easier to love you before you were born. I’m afraid of you. You disgust me. I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

Chouette feels highly original, something which is difficult to achieve in contemporary fiction, when so much is published every single day. What I found incredibly interesting in this unflinching portrait of motherhood is that Oshetsky, who is on the autism spectrum herself, based this, her debut novel, on her own experiences parenting ‘non-conforming children’. Oshetsky’s narrative is powerful, and I loved the way in which she uses magical realism; this element makes Chouette at once creepy and beautiful, and bridges the gap between the real and imagined quite wonderfully. I very much enjoyed the fact that I had no idea what was going to happen as the narrative went on I do not feel the novel has received anywhere near as much attention as it deserves, and would urge anyone who wants to read something a bit different to go and track down a copy.

Novella November: ‘Mrs Caliban’ by Rachel Ingalls ***

Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs Caliban is a novella which I had been intrigued by for quite some time. The New Yorker calls it ‘a miracle’, and Carmen Maria Machado declares it a ‘feminist masterpiece’. Mrs Caliban was also named by the British Book Marketing Guild as ‘one of the greatest American novels since World War II – to [Ingall’s] surprise.’

Mrs Caliban focuses on Dorothy, a grieving housewife living in the suburbs in California. She has recently lost her young son to an illness, and suffered a miscarriage. She and her unfaithful – and very unlikeable, it must be said – husband Fred are ‘too unhappy to get a divorce’. One day, early on in the story, Dorothy is listening to the radio when she hears a story about a dangerous ‘green-skinned sea monster’ escaping from a local research institute. He then, of course, turns up in her kitchen.

Larry the Frogman is ‘muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic and excellent at housework’. When she meets this ‘gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature’, Dorothy falls for him immediately. Ingalls describes their meeting thus: ‘She stopped before she knew she had stopped, and looked, without realising that she was taking anything in. She was as surprised and shocked as if she had heard an explosion and seen her own shattered legs go flying across the floor.’ She immediately offers him a bed in the guest room, and a large vegetable salad which she had conveniently been preparing. The very next day, ‘They made love on the living-room floor and on the dining-room sofa and sitting in the kitchen chairs, and upstairs in the bathtub.’

The Faber Editions version of the novella includes a new foreword written by Irenosen Okojie, which I read with interest. She writes: ‘Through her remarkable, uniquely strange tales, Rachel Ingalls subverts the expectations of storytelling within modern consciousness.’ She goes on to say that the author ‘moves beyond the limits of form with a lightness of touch. It is a hallucinatory vision anchored by the tricks and tribulations of everyday people, mining the disintegration of a marriage within the suffering constraints of American suburbia with nuance and originality.’ Okojie also laments that Ingalls – a writer whom she says has a ‘singular aesthetic’ which encompasses ‘Gothic symphony, suburban horror, warped fable, [and] avant-garde cinematic ode’ – ‘remains in obscurity’. This is despite Ingalls publishing more than ten books.

I was most excited about the element of magical realism here, something which I love when it is done well. I had quite high hopes for the way in which Ingalls would handle this. At first, the magical realism here feels quite natural, but it becomes more and more absurd as the narrative gathers speed. I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief after the first forty pages or so, and had to do so consciously – an action which felt forced. I like magical realism to sweep me up entirely, but Mrs Caliban sadly failed to do this. It also seems to veer toward science fiction somewhere around the middle, which I was not expecting, and did not entirely like.

One aspect of Mrs Caliban which I would have liked to see explored further is that of madness. There are hints at the outset that Dorothy is being plagued by stories she hears on the radio ‘that couldn’t possibly be real… She hadn’t thought she was going crazy, not straight away. She believed it was just her own thoughts forcing themselves into the low-pitched sounds and their insistent rhythm.’ This seemed promising, but what could have been an incredibly interesting part of the story is largely left alone. In her introduction, Okigie does elude to the way in which Larry might be a mere figment of Dorothy’s imagination, something to help her cope with the pain of her loss. However, this is not clear within the story itself, and I think this is a shame.

Something which is done well here is the way in which Ingalls touches upon Dorothy’s grief. This is a motif which is repeated throughout at intervals. We are told, for instance: ‘At first, after Scotty and the baby when she had begun the compulsive restless walks, [her husband Fred] had been worried about her… She was unprotected, he said. Anything could happen, even in the suburbs, even in a nice one like theirs.’ I did feel a lot of empathy where Dorothy was concerned. After she meets Larry, Ingalls writes: ‘For so many years there had been nothing… She had no interests, no marriage to speak of, no children. Now, at last, she had something.’

Mrs Caliban is strange, but highly beguiling, and I was swept into the story very early on. However, my interest in the story did began to wane, and I think the main reason for this was the extensive sections of dialogue between all of the main characters. There were some tender moments – for instance, in the emotional relationship which grew between Dorothy and Larry – but this was overshadowed by the often quite dull sections of conversation which permeate the whole, and add very little overall to the story. I understand that these parts were used in order to try and help Dorothy and Larry understand one another’s worlds, but on the whole, they felt overdone, and quite strained. Had Mrs Caliban featured more omniscient narrative – something which worked very well here – and less of these conversations, I may well have enjoyed it a lot more.

First published in 1982, Mrs Caliban is bound up in the feminist movement, and is very interesting to read with this perspective in mind. At just 117 pages, it is rather quick to get through, but it certainly raises a lot of questions, and elements to mull over further. Mrs Caliban is certainly an unusual book, and it is one which I would recommend if you are looking to pick up something a little different. I did want to keep turning the pages to see what would happen, but without giving anything away, I do not feel as though it was entirely satisfying as it reached its end. As the story went on, I did find myself using curiosity about Dorothy in particular, and I’m not sure that I’d pick up another of Ingalls’ books on the strength of this one.

‘The Merry Spinster’ by Daniel Mallory Ortberg ****

I had not heard of The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror before I plucked it from a library shelf, but I had read snippets about its author, Mallory Ortberg, around the Internet. I really enjoy magical realism, and hadn’t read much of it during 2020, so I very much looked forward to beginning this short story collection.

The Merry Spinster reminded me – after reading its blurb, and a host of comments which point to its originality – of something by Kirsty Logan, an author whose work I always find clever and imaginative. A review by John Scalzi particularly caught my eye; he writes that ‘the sloe gin wit of Dorothy Parker and the soul of a Classics nerd’ have been combined in Ortberg’s work.

The Merry Spinster is comprised of eleven ‘darkly mischievous stories based on classic fairy tales. Sinister and inviting, familiar and alien’, Ortberg ‘updates traditional children’s stories… with elements of psychological horror, emotional clarity and a keen sense of feminist mischief.’ The author has also included a short note on the sources and inspirations used in this collection – the Brothers Grimm feature heavily, but authors famous for tales about anthropomorphic animals, such as Kenneth Grahame and Arnold Lobel, also make an appearance. There is even a biblical tale, based on Genesis.

I very much liked the frank, cool matter-of-fact prose in these tales. In the first, ‘Daughter Cells’, Ortberg writes: ‘There once was a king who owned a great deal of what lay under the surface of the sea, and he happened to fill it with his daughters. Another man might have filled it with something else – potato farmers or pop-eyed scholars or merchant marines – but this one filled it with daughters, so there’s no use arguing about it now.’

I loved the unusual descriptions which Ortberg often creates, in which the monstrous is made a thing of beauty, and vice versa. For instance, in ‘The Daughter Cells’: ‘Now here is what the sea witch looked like: she was hinged neatly in the middle; she could jump very high by bending and straightening her great-foot; she could whistle water through her teeth and hit a swimming fish one hundred yards away; and she had no head at all. She was lovely to look at.’

Ortberg somehow makes the lewd and ridiculous feel quite realistic, and writes throughout with a practiced hand. A lot of societal conventions, particularly those regarding sexuality and gender, are turned on their head. There is something both whimsically old-fashioned and searingly modern to be found within The Merry Spinster, particularly with regard to its dialogue patterns.

Clues are given in each story regarding their original source material, but there is certainly something which feels fresh and new within The Merry Spinster. Much of Ortberg’s prose holds the sinister, unsettling feeling which, of course, exists in the vast majority of fairytales. Ortberg’s stories, which often move in surprising directions, are rather beguiling, and highly memorable. They provoke much consideration in the mind of the reader with their clever subversion of events. The Merry Spinster is strange and unsettling, but it also hums with a true beauty.

‘The Changeling’ by Joy Williams ****

It pleased me when I saw that Joy Williams’ rather forgotten novel, The Changeling, was back in print after forty years, having first been published in 1978. The New York Times declares Williams ‘one of the great writers of her generation’, an opinion which has been echoed by many.

The Changeling is a novel steeped in mystery and magical realism. Our focus is Pearl, a young mother trapped inside her marriage to Walker. At the outset of the novel, she has fled to the anonymous bar of a Florida hotel, with her infant son, Sam: ‘She was running away from home, from her husband… She had boarded a plane and traveled twelve hundred miles in three hours. The deception that had been necessary! The organization! People were always talking to her at home, on her husband’s island. She couldn’t bear it any more. She had to have a new life.’ This soon proves to be an unsuccessful escape, however, as Walker suddenly appears to force her home.

On her return, the unnamed island off the coast of the United States is ‘transformed into a place of madness and pain’. Pearl soon ‘slips into the delirium of motherhood and alcoholism’, becoming convinced that Sam is not her baby. The Changeling is unsettling throughout, and there is a lot of tension between its characters, as well as between Pearl’s physical body and her mind.

The reissued novel has an introduction by author Karen Russell, whose work I very much enjoy. She writes that the novel ‘feels at once unprecedented and eerily familiar’, and goes on to say: ‘Every great book shapeshifts with its reader. The Changeling, however, does something wilder still: it generates its own autonomous magic, one that feels wholly independent of the reader and her moment. The spirit inside it is not the human spirit – it is far vaster than that.’

Russell, who says that she has read The Changeling on numerous occasions, comments that Williams’ sentences ‘have a cartilaginous magic. They come glinting out of profound and mysterious depths, slipping quickly through the deadening nets of any easy understanding.’ In a particularly beautifully phrased observation, she writes: ‘This is a young tale; its landscape is the womb of the world, its language is perennially green, and the only thing I can say about it with absolute conviction is that your encounter will surely be very different than my own.’

In the very first chapter of the book, whilst Pearl sits in the Florida bar, Williams captures such an atmosphere, something which goes on to suffuse the entire novel. She also gives us a real insight into the state of Pearl’s mentality: ‘The heavy white air hung visibly in layers. Pearl could see the layers very clearly. The middle layer was all dream and misunderstanding and responsibility. Things moved about at the top with a little more arrogance and zip but at the bottom was the ever-moving present. It was the present, it had been the present, and it was always going to be the present. Pearl was always conscious of this. It made her pretty passive and indecisive usually.’

When, on the way back to the island, Pearl is involved in a plane crash, she becomes convinced that her son has been swapped with another baby. She is uncertain around him, afraid. When he gets older, this feeling still remains; he is a constant reminder to Pearl that something is not quite right. ‘He seemed,’ writes Williams, ‘all the disorder of her heart. She saw the infant in his face still. His other face, his boy’s face, was harder for her to recognize. He didn’t speak to her as the other children did. He kept away. She had no real sense of his purposes. Were not his purposes rooted in her responsibility? But she was an irresponsible woman, removed from everything, floating through space, exercising longing.’

There are some deeply unsettling, nightmarish scenes throughout The Changeling, and elements of strange eroticism. In one particularly chilling example, Williams includes a hallucination which Pearl has: ‘She was having a baby in a large, freshly cut field. There was blood on the grass but it may not have been her own… Her thighs were spread. Her arms were spread. She was going to have a baby. She knew that those around her were going to cut open her stomach and fold back the flaps of skin and unfold the baby from her like a bridal gown. She knew that they would abandon her there, her terrible dark wound a nest for the dying creatures of the night.’

Pearl’s mania develops as the novel goes on, and its scenes become all the more unnerving: ‘In the night, demons chattered in her aching head, not voices at all but comprehensible all the same. Terrible things. Creeping or winged, dark and avenging, carving a woman like her out of carrion, out of mold. Carving this woman out with their sharp beaks.’

Nothing about The Changeling feels at all dated. Rather, it is fresh and original, a modern fairy tale written in lyrical prose, which holds so much surprise. The novel is beguiling and disturbing in equal measure, and it reads as though one is in a dreamlike – or nightmarish – state. There is a real claustrophobia to it, in both its tension and atmosphere, and I found it incredibly creepy.

Williams has authored three other novels and three short story collections; I can only hope that these will become readily available, and soon. I imagine that, like with The Changeling, I will be thinking about each of her stories for a long time to come.

‘Awayland: Stories’ by Ramona Ausubel ****

Ramona Ausubel is one of my absolute favourite authors, but her work has proven to be rather difficult to find in the United Kingdom. When I spotted a copy of her newest publication, a short story collection entitled Awayland, for an affordable price on AbeBooks, I just had to order it. This gorgeously designed paperback has been well received, with the San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, writing that it ‘astounds for its daring visionary scope and compassion.’

Eleven tales make up Awayland, and these have been subsequently split up into different sections, something which feels rather rare in the form of a short story collection. They introduce us, says the blurb, ‘to a geography both fantastic and familiar’, and to the ‘tangle and thump of her characters’ inner worlds and emotional truths’.

The first rather humorous story in the collection, ‘You Can Find Love Now’, takes us through the dating profile of a Cyclops; he calls himself Cyclops15 online, as ‘Cyclops 1 through 14 were taken’. In ‘Freshwater from the Sea’, a woman in Lebanon is nearing the end of her life, and is beginning to disappear. Ausubel writes: ‘Where she had once been a precise oil painting, now she was a watercolor.’ Her state is continually changing, and as we near the end of the story, her daughter observes: ‘She looked more and more like weather, like a brewing storm.’

‘Template for a Proclamation to Save the Species’ is set in the ‘shittiness’ of a town in northern Minnesota, where the residents are failing to reproduce. The narrator of the story observes: ‘It is as if their lives are so boring, so deeply muddy that it hardly even occurs to two people with enough feeling to create anything other than a disappointed sigh.’ The town’s mayor puts into place a ‘designated sex day’, which culminates in the prize of a free car for whichever couple gives birth first on a chosen date.

‘Departure Lounge’ is a story about a group of astronauts, in training in a remote part of Hawaii: ‘We lived in a bubble on a crater on a mountain on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but where we imagined we lived was Mars.’ The chef of the group, who narrates the story, later reveals her loneliness, and her sadness at the way in which her own plans have been put on hold in order to take part in the experiment: ‘I would be a good mother. I would be generous and interested in all the side-roads of childhood – superheroes and princesses and dinosaurs and bugs and minor weaponry and animal rights. I would mean it, if only someone would join me in my little life.’

There is much in Awayland about bodies changing, both in terms of ageing, and from flesh into other states. Many of the stories contain pregnancy, and what it means to move into the state of motherhood. Ausubel also reflects at length on what it means to confront one’s own mortality. Throughout, Ausubel’s prose is layered, and unusual. In ‘Remedy’, for instance, protagonist Summer is described as ‘the smell of fire and the smell of pine forest and the smell of a storm’.

I find Ausubel’s work wondrously inventive, but I must admit that Awayland is my least favourite of her publications to date. Whilst there are undoubtedly some great and original ideas to be found here, I did not feel as though the sense of creativity and imagination which normally suffuses her stories was as strong as it perhaps could have been. The tales are not as memorable as I was expecting, either.

There is whimsy here, something which Ausubel usually excels with, but this sometimes feels a little overshadowed by other elements. There is also a great deal less magical realism than can be found in earlier stories and novels. Regardless, Ausubel definitely deserves a great deal more attention, and I wholeheartedly look forward to her next book – whatever that may be.

‘A Biography of a Chance Miracle’ by Tanja Maljartschuk ****

Some books come into your life unexpectedly, without any warning, and only after you have engaged with them for a little while you realise they were exactly what you have been looking for, even though you never even knew they existed in the first place. One of those books is A Biography of a Chance Miracle, written by the Ukrainian author Tanja Maljartschuk, translated into English by Zenia Tompkins and published by Cadmus Press.

After spending quite a long time away from the blog, what better way to return than with a review of a beautiful and thought-provoking book such as this. A Biography of a Chance Miracle is a book that came into my life by utter and complete chance and I am so thankful that it did.

The story of this novel follows Lena, a young girl who is born and grows up in a Western Ukrainian city which she calls San Francisco. We follow Lena from her childhood years to her adolescence and early adulthood as she tries to figure out the world around her, a world she never seems to be able to fit into. A rebellious but sensitive soul, Lena refuses to conform to any kind of rule set upon her even as a child, and she always speaks up when she sees injustice and maltreatment, although that rarely ends up in her favour.

Vividly depicting the political and cultural climate of Ukraine at the time, the author brings issues of cultural dispute with Russia, the inability of the government to take care of its people and the vast, chaotic mess that is bureaucracy to the forefront. Although everyone in her country is taught to hate Russia, Lena seems to feel a peculiar affinity and likeness towards this country and its language, for which she is repeatedly punished. She also seems to be drawn to the ‘forlorn creatures’ as she calls them, those people who also don’t seem to fit in and are different from the norm, like her classmate and childhood friend who she nicknames Dog or her university roommate Vasylyna, a burly athlete with an unexpectedly soft side.

Lena’s aspiration in life is to not lead a stupid and meaningless life like most of the people around her do. In order to achieve that, she takes on the role of the saviour and tries to help the people that need her the most through a series of small ‘miracles’. From an activist fighting for stray dogs’ rights to fighting against bureacracy just to earn a wheelchair for her crippled friend, Lena is an advocate of justice that no one really seems to appreciate, as most of her endeavours end up in failure. Her spirit and determination always shine through, though, something which culminates in the rather ambiguous ending. The presence of magical realism makes the ending rather unclear and leaves the reader wondering if what is described is really what happened or if it’s all just part of Lena’s machinations, but I guess, such an ending would be the only fitting one for a character as whimsical as Lena.

I loved Maljartschuk’s prose and writing style because it is poignant yet subtle and humorous at the same time. She manages to satirise the state of Ukraine at that time by balancing reality and serious topics with wit, surrealism and the right dose of humour. It is precisely the kind of sociopolitical critique that I utterly enjoy reading. The translation also needs to be commended, since the prose flowed effortlessly and all the cultural references were presented in a friendly way to those who may not be familiar with the Ukrainian culture.

One of the main reasons why this novel came so close to my heart is because reading about the state of post-war Ukraine and the way bureaucracy and the system keep on failing their people sadly reminded me so much of the current situation in Greece. And that’s a sad, sad truth to realise.

To finish off, I would like to say a few words about Cadmus Press, a fairly new publishing house committed to bringing the most outstanding literature from Europe, focusing on Eastern and Southeastern European countries, in English translation. I think their undertaking is really impressive and I’m always in for some of the most notable lesser-known literary voices of Europe, especially if they are as impressive as A Biography of a Chance Miracle.

I strongly, strongly recommend you pick up this book. No matter what your reading preferences may be, this book will definitely tug at your heartstrings and play the sweetest melody in your soul. I enjoyed every single second I spent reading this book and I really hope more of the author’s books become available in English in the very near future, as I see her quickly climbing up the list of my favourite authors.

A copy of this wonderful book was very kindly provided to me by the publisher, Cadmus Press.

‘The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart’ by Mathias Malzieu **

I expected that Mathias Malzieu’s novel of magical realism, The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, would be both quirky and charming, and full of whimsy.  It is described as ‘a dark and tender fairytale spiced with devilish humour.’  I have had the novel on my to-read list for years, and was very excited when my slim hardback copy arrived.  However, my overwhelming feeling about the novel is one of disappointment.

The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart has been translated from its original French by Sarah Ardizzone, and opens in Edinburgh in 1874.  A baby named Jack is born to a very young mother, and is found to have a frozen heart.  He is given an operation, in which the unconventional Dr Madeleine ‘surgically implants a cuckoo clock into his chest.’  The novel’s first sentences set the initial tone, although they do give a feeling of fairytale and wonder, which is not carried through the entire book: ‘Firstly: don’t touch the hands of your cuckoo-clock heart.  Secondly: master your anger.  Thirdly: never, ever fall in love.  For if you do, the hour hand will poke through your skin, your bones will shatter, and your heart will break once more.’

The novel is narrated by Jack, and follows his infatuation with an Andalusian girl made of fire: ‘Almost without realising it, I’m falling in love.  Except I do realise it too.  Inside my clock, it’s the hottest day on earth.’  Dr Madeleine, who becomes his guardian after his mother abandons him, worries that love will be a dangerous experience, and that his heart will be quite unable to take the strain.  She tells him: ‘Your cuckoo-clock heart will explode.  I was the one who grafted that clock on to you, and I have a perfect understanding of its limits.  It might survive the intensity of pleasure, and beyond.  But it is not robust enough to endure the torment of love.’  Jack’s narrative voice rarely feels authentic when he is supposed to be a child, and there is little change within it as he reaches adulthood.  There is next to no character development within the novel, which is a real shame.

The initial descriptions which Malzieu gives of Edinburgh are highly sensuous: ‘Edinburgh and its steep streets are being transformed.  Fountains metamorphose, one by one, into bouquets of ice.  The old river, normally so serious, is disguised as an icing sugar lake that stretches all the way to the sea.’  Other descriptions too verge upon the breathtaking: ‘… the hoarfrost stitches sequins on to cats’ bodies.  The trees stretch their arms, like fat fairies in white nightshirts, yawning at the moon…’.  Whilst the descriptions of both place and people are by turns lively and inventive, it did not seem to me as though the rest of Malzieu’s writing quite stood up.  It is when the narrative moves from Scotland to Spain that such descriptions start to suffer; they become relatively few and far between, and feel a little repetitive in what they pinpoint and express.

On initially viewing the dustjacket’s design and reading the blurb, I would have thought that The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart would be a suitable book for a child to read.  It seems not, however; there are several marked references to sex, and some quite coarse language at times too.  One of the fundamental flaws of the novel for me was that it did not appear to know exactly what it wanted to be, and there was too much going on at some points, and not enough at others.  It felt inconsistent, and did not hold my interest once its initial few chapters had passed.  I had qualms with the modern feel of the dialogue, which did not fit with the chosen time period at all; the historical detail was also rather patchy, and there are a few clumsy mistakes to be found for the eagle-eyed reader.

There are certainly some interesting ideas at play here, and I particularly admired the inclusion of Georges Melies, a real-life figure whose playful short films I love.  It did not quite come together in my opinion, however, and felt markedly peculiar.  It was difficult to immerse myself within the story, and it certainly loses momentum at points due to its inconsistent pacing.  The fairytale elements which are emphasised within the book’s blurb are relatively non-existent.  The translation was fluid, but regardless, I ended up disliking more about the novel than I liked.  The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart is what I imagine literary steampunk would be like; of marked interest to the right reader, but not really of appeal to this one.

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Two Reviews: ‘The Year of the Runaways’ and ‘The Paper Menagerie’

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota ****
Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways is an urgent, momentous novel about the experience of three young men who immigrate from India to the United Kingdom in hope of finding work. From the very beginning, Sahota’s study of his characters is incredibly detailed. I loved the inclusion of so much cultural minutiae, and found that the use of words in different Indian dialects without their translations being given adds yet another layer to the whole. The story is incredibly evocative of place and space, and every single strand of story has been well pulled together. The way in which the different characters’ stories intertwined was clever.

The Year of the Runaways is a relatively slow novel, in the very best way. The backstories of each of Sahota’s characters are eminently believable, as are their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. The novel is so immersive that it becomes difficult to put down. The Year of the Runaways is an eye-opening book, and I felt so empathetic toward all of the protagonists, as well as their wider families. I read this important book with rapt attention, and cannot recommend it enough.

 

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu ***
So many reviewers have loved The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and as I am always keen to discover new short story authors, I borrowed a copy from my local library. I am neither a fan of science fiction nor of fantasy, and so wasn’t sure if I would enjoy these tales as much as a lot of my friends have. I found some of the inclusions to be quirky and inventive, and preferred Liu’s writing when the magical realism was present, and no robots, etc., were. Some of the tales here engaged me far more than others, although I half expected as much when reading the blurb before I began.

The Paper Menagerie is varied in terms of its content, but I found it rather a mixed bag. I adored the rather beautiful title story, but a lot of the others fell short in comparison. However, his voice has a wonderful consistency to it regardless of the perspective used, and each tale is nicely told. Liu clearly has an expansive imagination, and comes up with some fascinating ideas, but a lot of them were too firmly rooted in science fiction for my personal taste. The Asian culture which is dispersed throughout was fascinating, however, and was one of the real strengths of the book for me.

 

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A Month of Favourites: ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern

Before I begin to speak about The Night Circus, I must say that the book itself (I am lucky enough to have the first edition hardback) is a thing of beauty.  Its pages are edged in black, the endpapers and illustrated pages are extremely pretty, and there is even a lovely red ribbon bookmark attached.  It pleases me when so much thought has been put into the aesthetic elements of the book, and this is one of my favourites in terms of design.

The blurb is incredibly enticing:

“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. 

“But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.”

I first read The Night Circus last year, and very much enjoyed it.  I love the way in which the novel begins, and Morgenstern sets the scene beautifully.  The way in which she describes the circus is enchanting, and this element strengthens as the novel goes on.  I adore the descriptions of the enchantments which can be found within each tent; they drip with beauty, and Morgenstern has a way of making everything she writes about incredibly vivid.  The Night Circus is an incredibly absorbing book.  It has been plotted in such a way that as soon as one begins to read, a spell of sorts is cast upon them, which makes them want to do nothing but read on.

‘The Night Circus’ sculpture by Rabarama at deviantART

The use of different narrative techniques throughout is done in a skilful manner.  The main thread of the story is written using the third person perspective, and small sections of it use the second person, addressing the reader directly and making them a part of the story.  So many tales have been wondrously woven together, and many characters who are intrinsically linked within the circus come to light as the novel weaves its magic.  The characterisation is sublime.

I found, on my second reading, that I enjoyed it even more than the first.  It has joined my list of treasures, and is a novel which I will come back to again and again.  The Night Circus is beautiful, enchanting and incredibly clever, and the images which it creates will never leave me.

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