Back with another Booker longlist post! These are the two shortest on the list, explaining why I knocked them over quickly.
I am currently listening to the audiobook of The South, which, at the 30% mark, I'm not overly pumped about (but I'll press on, it can be my exercise and driving audio for a few days). After that, I have three more sizeable books to tackle - Flashlight, which is a chonker, and The Land in Winter and Endling, which are both mid (standard) length novels. I'll probably post the next pair of reviews next week sometime, depending how fast I progress.
I'm already predicting that the three books I won't get to before shortlist announcement in September are the Adam book, which is proving tough to locate; the Szalay book, because I don't like the premise (it seems to be some kind of reverse Lolita); and the Desai (well, I definitely won't get to that one, as it's not even released until two days after the shortlist).
Here is the list with read books highlighted.
1. Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian)
2. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (British)
3. Flesh by David Szalay (Canadian)
4. Endling by Maria Reva (Ukrainian / Canadian)
5. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (British)
6. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (American / British)
7. Audition by Katie Kitamura (American)
8. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Indian / British)
9. Flashlight by Susan Choi (American)
10. One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (British)
11. Universality by Natasha Brown (British)
12. The South by Tash Aw (Malaysian)
13. Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidadian)
This book did not hit for me at all. I liked the set-up and thought it had interesting possibilities - the framing, of a long-term investigative journalism piece about a bizarre crime, was well-conceived and initially quite effective.
That said, I disliked almost everything that followed the end of the "article" section. I thought the chapter with Hannah, the journalist, and her obnoxious friends was depressing and also dull. I thought the section from the perspective of the banker / owner of the farm where the assault took place was pointless and unengaging. I thought Jake was a remarkably boring perpetrator, and the commune folk were underwhelming and massively underdeveloped.
Most of all, I hated the character of the shock-columnist, Lenny, so giving her the first-person narration of the last section just put the final nail in the coffin for me.
Lenny seems to be an incoherent pastiche of people like Candace Owens, Miranda Devine and Posie Parker, with well-trodden and desperately uninteresting takes on classism, wokeism, the evils of diversity, the evils of single parenting, etc etc etc. The old rag about white men being marginalised in the modern world due to people other than white men getting a shot (a lament that has been around since it was labelled "political correctness" rather than "wokeism", and is as silly and whiny now as it was then) is probably meant to sound transgressive, but it just reads to me like the exact same ragebait I could read for free in any right-wing tabloid any day of the week. It would have been possible for Brown to use Lenny's character to interrogate the culture of division and outrage-mining that drives shock columns, but instead she just serves up a fictionalised version of what we see around us with no real analysis or insight.
In short: it's a no from me!
Score: 5/10, and only even that high because the writing style is clear and vivid, which I appreciated.
Shortlist: I definitely hope not!
This book had me so turned about that I almost wasn't going to review it at all, but I decided I would after some more reflection. It is disturbing, diffuse, frustrating, and ultimately really unsatisfying; however, it is also quite clever in a postmodern vein, written by a writer whose stylistic skills are very acute and who knows her way around evocative language.
The core premise of the book is a middle-aged actress who is performing in a new play and struggling with a key scene, when a young man, Xavier, comes into her life, of about the right age to be her son.
The strange twists and byways of her evolving (non-romantic) relationship with him are tangled up inextricably with her relationship with her writer husband Tomas, with her craft, and with herself, with a narrative change-up at the halfway mark that completely reframes everything.
It is a book that is primarily composed of abstract ideas and slippery concepts and the unfixed self, while ostensibly exploring more grounded themes like motherhood or its lack, the actor's relationship to their work, middle-aged marriage, ambition, and power.
It was very difficult, in the end, to decide what rating to give, because I did not enjoy this book but I did admire it (somewhat begrudgingly). I decided to rate it as I would a debate speech, dividing my thoughts into Matter (the story), Manner (the voice) and Method (the technical execution).
On the first of these, I thought the book was a failure. I understand what Kitamura was reaching for (I think), with the two halves of the book having such different realities and the meta-theme of the performed self, but I found the story itself opaque and so diffuse as to be meaningless. Some scenes in particular struck me as ridiculous and overwrought to the point of farce, especially in the final section (the passage that follows the narrator's early return home to find her apartment ablaze with light is both a little sickening and also really disjunctive to the point of chaotic meaninglessness). I don't mind stories that shift and change, and I love me an unreliable narrator, but I do like some coherence in a story arc, and on that measure, this book was a bust.
On the second measure (Manner), I thought the book was stronger. The narrator's voice, while not appealing as such, was compellingly cool and mostly consistent. I did not miss the hints throughout that she was not an entirely stable person, or more particularly, did not have a stable sense of self, but I thought that worked quite well for the voice (in a way that it didn't for the story).
In terms of Method, Kitamura's stylistic mastery is hard to fault. She is a both a technical and an evocative writer, and, barring her decision to exclude speech marks (common in the pomo crowd but a constant irritant to me), I rate her writing highly as an example of craft.
Overall, this book provoked neither an emotional nor an intellectual response of any substance in me. In the absence of any kind of connection, the highest-concept literature in the world is not going to be on my list of good books, and that's the case here, despite the fact that I freely concede to Kitamura's high level of writing skill. Others may love this book, but I am not the reader for it.
Score: 6/10 (primarily for Kitamura's unimpeachable technical skills)
Shortlist: Probably, Booker judges love a bit of high-class pomo (although I wouldn't shortlist it myself!)
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