This will be my last longlist post - I'm bailing out at 8, with 2 partially read (Endling and Flashlight) and 3 fully unread, being The Rest of Our Lives, Flesh, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (the last of which won't even be out until after the shortlist drop).
Overall, I haven't been super delighted by this longlist, which is why I have decided to punt at 8. When the shortlist is announced, I'll circle back to pick up any that make the cut which I haven't read (I'm certainly expecting that the Desai book, which comes out two days after the shortlist drop, will make an appearance, given the usual quality of her work).
Of the 8 books I've read, if I personally was compiling the shortlist, the two definites would be Seascraper and Love Forms. I'd also add The Land in Winter and Audition as strong possibles if the balance of the list doesn't cut the mustard. That's me, but I suspect the judges could also go for The South and / or One Boat, the first because of its setting and themes and the second for its maudlin existential moanings. The book I'd be disappointed to see make the cut is Universality, which I genuinely think had no business even being on the longlist. I'll certainly finish Flashlight and Endling at some point, and I hear from other readers I trust that The Rest of Our Lives is a goodie, so that may well be one I need to come back to regardless of what happens with the list.
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 is a well-written book, with some lovely descriptions of place - the small Greek seaside town that is the location of the "action" (scare quotes explained!) comes through vividly.
However, it also has no plot worth speaking of, and no characters (except potentially one - John) to really care about, including the narrator-protagonist Teresa. Really, it is largely composed of a series of existential musings that mostly don't stick the landing, coming across as either borderline trite or completely non-compelling.
The framing for the story is an English lawyer, Teresa, whose father has newly died. She revisits the same small Greek town she came to 9 years earlier after the death of her mother, hoping (one supposes) to interrogate her grief and come to some resolution, as the town helped her to do following the loss of her mother.
Teresa's relationship with both parents was complicated, and her grief is mixed with ambivalence and existential terror, which provides fodder for some lengthy soliloquies on the meaning(lessness) of human life and what might lie beyond it (which is .... nothing, as Teresa and another key character, Petros, unoriginally conclude).
The narrative flips back and forth between the present day and the trip 9 years earlier, not always clarifying where we are in time, which I'm sure was a deliberate strategy, but I found very irritating. The more interesting (for a certain value of "interesting") things that happen in the book all happen in the past, when Teresa meets the only character I connected with at all, John, the tortured Englishman who has come to Greece in search of his nephew's killer who escaped justice at home. Teresa's affair with local dive instructor, Niko, was a complete yawnfest (as was Niko as a character, and pretty much everyone else, including the allegedly deep mechanic-poet Petros). The moral conundra and genuine pain that John provided was one of the only real breaths of life in a book otherwise swaddled in dead air.
Is this a terrible book? Not really, it's well-written enough. Did I enjoy it? No, but I also didn't loathe it, it didn't provoke strong enough emotions for that. Should it be on the Booker shortlist? I do not think so, but I often pick very differently to the judges, so we'll see!
Score: 5.5/10
Shortlist: I hope not...
This book really moved me, in a way that few books on the longlist have done. It's a work of narrative reflection that doesn't use clever tricks, weird devices, or postmodern flourishes, but delivers a beating heart that some of the more highbrow works definitely don't possess.
The protagonist-narrator, Dawn, is a white Trinidadian woman in middle age who lives in London (where's she's been located since her university days and where she married, later divorced, and raised her two now-adult sons). London is the setting of some of the scenes, but compared with Trinidad and Tobago, where a good portion of the action takes place, it seems muted, grey, boring. Dawn's own heart is in her birthplace - or, perhaps even more specifically, in the family holiday home on Tobago - and her complicated history with, and feelings about, her warm but also traditional family are the undercurrent that flows through the book, tugging at strands of story that may at first look unrelated.
The defining event of Dawn's early life, which shapes her entire life, is her pregnancy at age 16 and subsequent shipping-off to a nun-staffed birthing home for unwed mothers in Venezuela, where she has her daughter and immediately leaves her to return to Trinidad. This event, which takes place in 1980, colours and influences everything that happens in Dawn's life thereafter - her medical training, her marriage to fellow doctor Rob (a safe choice that her family approves of), the way she parents her sons, Finlay and Oscar, and most tellingly, the loving resentment she feels towards her parents and to a lesser extent her older brothers.
58 years old when the book opens, Dawn is working in a real estate office, living a modest but comfortable life, and searching, as she has been for many years, for the daughter she left behind in Venezuela. The ache of that early, barely-acknowledged-by-family loss of her first child has never left her, nor the completely unacknowledged trauma of her semi-abduction and difficult birth. Throughout much of the book, she corresponds with a young woman, Monica, who may fit the bill (the question is answered with a DNA result, but I will not spoil!)
The conversations with Monica, and more particularly, the conversations Dawn has with herself about Monica and about her sons and her parents, provide a searing and melancholy insight into a life, and into the reality that some decisions have shadows that never fade, no matter how long ago they were made. The book is not lyrical, although it is vividly descriptive (especially in the Trinidad parts), but it has an authenticity of voice and tone that worked extremely well for me. Perhaps it's because I, too, am a middle-aged woman with young adult kids finding their way, but I found Dawn incredibly relatable and sympathetic, despite our different backgrounds and life trajectories (and although I have never lost a child, I felt the magnitude of Dawn's loss in my bones). I even enjoyed the patois, and I am not usually a big fan of dialect in novels (but here, it felt so natural and right that it did not raise a single hackle).
I can't do any better than to end this review with Dawn's own memory that ends the book, of creeping downstairs in the mother and baby home to soothe her crying newborn daughter:
"I pressed her warm little body against my own. I felt the pulse of her heart against my body, thudding and frantic, like beating wings. I kissed her soft, sweet head. I stroked her back, and whispered into her ear. Gradually, her wailing eased ... Where have you been? she seemed to be saying. I called and called for you! ... I allowed the baby to be taken from my arms. But I remember it now, that for those few moments, she and I were together. The snug warmth of her body melting into my own. The softness of her head against my cheek. We had that time together. We were given that gift."
Score: 8.5/10
Shortlist: It definitely should!
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