Joan Kerr ( of Writing is Easy)

Joan Kerr rated a book liked it Sister Europe by Nell Zink	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I was zipping along quite nicely with this until everything ground to a halt during an award-giving ceremony in Berlin for a celebrated Arabic writer. Expecting a brief ceremony followed by a meal in a Michelin-starred restaurant, the characters are ...more
Sep 09, 2025 07:20PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Sister Europe by Nell Zink. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Sister Europe by Nell Zink <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joan Kerr rated a book liked it Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The title says it all. How can you have a biography of someone without a name? Is X merely a stand-in for a name, or does it mean the person was an unknown quantity? Biography of X is a novel about a woman writing a biography. It mixes fictional char ...more
Sep 09, 2025 07:19PM · like · see review
Joan Kerr rated a book really liked it Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
On those nights when you can’t sleep, how your mind travels – back in time, sideways to possibilities, forward to other possibilities. People come back, staring at you, ignoring you, speaking, dancing. You wonder about them in a way you never had tim ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book liked it The Unwilding by Marina Kemp	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There are plenty of books that have as their centre a charismatic artist (always male) who controls his family simply by the force of his ego. We’re used to reading about his casual disregard for a self-effacing wife and the way the very being of his ...more
Sep 09, 2025 07:16PM · like · see review
Joan Kerr rated a book really liked it Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
"And only here did Mona, who had been doing the entire speech for Milton on a single lungful of stale audition room air, take her first breath. With the breath, a flicker of happiness, as welcome as it was unexpected, surprised her. Ths was Shakespea ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book really liked it Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Professor Tomofey Pnin’s CV: "Born in St Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918…Completed university education in Prague. Was connected with various scientific organisations…Well, to make a long story very short ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book liked it Still Lives by Maria Hummel (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
You’ll especially enjoy this if you like to read about the dirty little secrets of the art world. It’s the opening night of the Rocque Museum’s exhibition of Kim Lord’s latest work Still Lives, in which she portrays herself as a series of murdered wo ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book it was ok Outside Looking In by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
T. Coraghessan Boyle is known for fiction focusing on historical figures: John Harvey Kellogg, Frank Wright and Alfred Kinsey. This time he’s looking at Timothy Leary and his hallucinogenic drug experiments in the 1960s. Leary was introduced to hallu ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book liked it Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I enjoyed Yellowface a lot. Then I discovered that while some people have seen it as clever and entertaining (as I did) others have taken a very po-faced view of its take on racial authenticity and cultural appropriation. To these earnest souls I say ...more
Oct 04, 2024 06:55PM · like · see review
Joan Kerr rated a book really liked it The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The Holy Grail is Ernest Hemingway’s stolen suitcase full of first drafts. The setting is a run-down hotel in a Mexican town with a population of sixty people and ninety-two stray dogs. The dramatis personae are a writer whose best-sellers feature Al ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book liked it

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I was zipping along quite nicely with this until everything ground to a halt during an award-giving ceremony in Berlin for a celebrated Arabic writer. Expecting a brief ceremony followed by a meal in a Michelin-starred restaurant, the characters are I was zipping along quite nicely with this until everything ground to a halt during an award-giving ceremony in Berlin for a celebrated Arabic writer. Expecting a brief ceremony followed by a meal in a Michelin-starred restaurant, the characters are subjected to a lengthy series of speeches which are then translated into or from English, German and/or Arabic and redelivered. Released at last they find the meal that was one of their main reasons for coming is a mish-mash of over- or under-cooked dishes that have been waiting at least an hour after their serve-by date. The whole thing filled me with the same jittery sort of boredom the characters were feeling and a bemusement about where we’re supposed to be going as the characters set off into the cold in search of a BurgerKing.

Witty and clever observation creates a brilliant and sophisticated surface but I waited in vain for a trajectory. I wanted to stay with the character Nicole, a 15-year-old transitioning from being Kilian, but she faded away as the focus shifted to less interesting characters. It’s very Berlin – sophisticated, witty, world-weary, peopled mainly by well-established expatriates and wealthy people passing through. Some of these characters are attractive, some actively unpleasant, and some are amiable drifters. Like life, really, and maybe that’s the point: these people are so comfortable that even their awareness of life’s uglier side is a cushioned one, something they can talk about but not feel. So the wealthy Livia talks of her “dream” of creating a reception center for traumatized refugee children, with therapy horses, where their surroundings are natural and alive on her country estate at Drömling (inherited from her Nazi grandfather).

"Refugee ‘children’ are seventeen, Toto said, they don’t want to live in the friggin’ Drömling."

Die Zeit described Zink’s previous book Nicotine as “a wonderful satirical collection of scenes about young middle-class white people who will do anything in their greed for something to believe in.” That same satire is here, but there’s no fire in anyone’s belly to find anything to believe in. Maybe that’s why the book trails away as it does, like the sleep you fall into in the early hours of the morning after a party where you drank too much, where a lot seemed to happen but none of it meant anything, even if it felt as if it did at the time.

I don’t want to put anyone off reading Nell Zink because she’s an important writer in the midst of so many bland ones. There’s no one like her at her Zinkish best. If this book didn’t do it for me, you’ll find plenty of reviewers who loved it:

Zink cleverly and expertly combines hilarious scenes at the awards ceremony and the seven-course dinner with razor-sharp observations on culture, Americans in Europe, literature in the Middle East, sexuality, and the heavy hand of history. (Irish Times)

A slim, crackling novel that compresses an astonishing amount of life into just 190 pages … Aphoristic, brittle, often dazzling. (Booklist)

Or you may think, as I did:

Intriguing if slight … The meandering narrative is more intellectual exercise than story. (Publishers’ Weekly) ...more

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Biography of X
by Catherine Lacey (Goodreads Author)

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The title says it all. How can you have a biography of someone without a name? Is X merely a stand-in for a name, or does it mean the person was an unknown quantity? Biography of X is a novel about a woman writing a biography. It mixes fictional char The title says it all. How can you have a biography of someone without a name? Is X merely a stand-in for a name, or does it mean the person was an unknown quantity? Biography of X is a novel about a woman writing a biography. It mixes fictional characters with real ones like David Bowie, Kathy Acker, Connie Converse and Tom Waits. The woman, a journalist called C.M. Lucca, is writing in response to an unauthorised biography of her deceased wife, famous as an author, visual artist, conceptual performer, record producer and indie press publisher as well as for her adoption of multiple personalities and names and for her F-you attitude to pretty well everything. The irony is that for all her contempt for fame, she would have been very unhappy if nobody had noticed her.

Lucca has already won a Pulitzer prize and is a sought-after investigative journalist, but all that changes when she falls in love with X. She both fears and adores her, she lives for her attention and acceptance. She is no longer in control of the trajectory of her own life. X is fine with this; it’s what she expects from a partner. Even beyond the grave, she’s in charge. Lucca only begins her own work because another biography appears. The first crime of the other biographer is that X had forbidden him to write it and had cut off access to information as much as she could; the second crime is that he just doesn’t understand or truly appreciate her, as Lucca thinks she does until she starts her research. In retrospect we understand that X knew Lucca would want to write her biography, and that in the process of learning about X she would become just another of her tools for performative art. The awful fakeness of X, the cynicism of her proclaimed authenticity, stand out starkly against the real suffering of Lucca as she experiences the ultimate cruelty of X.

All of this takes place in a very familiar world where performative celebrity has become more important than hard-won artistic skill. But Lacey adds another element. This is an America that was violently split in 1945 with the Southern states seceding to become a bastion of fundamentalist Christianity, institutional racism and sexism, with the Northern states remaining liberal and the Western libertarian. The North-South frontier was policed as harshly as the one between East and West Germany. X is in fact an escapee from the South of those times. Although the barriers have now been dismantled and people can move from one state to another, the fundamental ideologies haven’t changed. There’s quite a lot of truth in this as a picture of modern-day America, but it didn’t really work for me structurally. It’s too big, too realistically detailed, and X’s ardent political activism of those days is too out-of-tune with the fashionable nihilism of her modern-day personality. I suppose that’s part of the point, that all of us have myriad facets and that our passions are transitory, that a conventional biography creates a false narrative about the consistency of a life, but it’s an over-elaborate way of making the point. And to tell the truth, once the initial picture is sketched, it isn’t all that interesting.

In the end, the strength and the interest of Biography of X is not in X but in the “mousy” C.M.Lucca and her obsessive love. I loved the closing words:

"At the morgue they weighed her body, measured it, measured each limb, weighed each organ, determined the cause of death. They gave me a document that described her body in the most discrete terms, as if we could ever say for certain where she ended and where the world began." ...more

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Sleepless Nights
by Elizabeth Hardwick

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On those nights when you can’t sleep, how your mind travels – back in time, sideways to possibilities, forward to other possibilities. People come back, staring at you, ignoring you, speaking, dancing. You wonder about them in a way you never had tim On those nights when you can’t sleep, how your mind travels – back in time, sideways to possibilities, forward to other possibilities. People come back, staring at you, ignoring you, speaking, dancing. You wonder about them in a way you never had time to wonder. It’s a fugue, with all the elements of the life which is yours woven in and out of each other, appearing and disappearing.

It is June, Elizabeth Hardwick begins. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.

As a summary of the magic of Sleepless Nights I can’t do as well as Eimar McBride in her comments in The Guardian:

"There is no confusion of selfhood or incoherence of purpose. This is a narrator who knows who she is and, pretty much, how she got to be that way. The resultant restive narrative is a deep delve into the processes of her thinking as she sleeplessly rolls back and forth across ideas, memories and conclusions. For the reader it is this encounter with a formidable mind working hard, mapping the journey from its root consciousness through myriad perceptions and recollections out into the physical world – where it may, or may not, allow itself to be changed by what it finds – which forms the spine of pleasure that holds the fragmented narrative together.

As one of the great literary critics of her era, arguably of any era, Hardwick had little truck with the perennially voguish notion that literary fiction should spend less time thinking and more time devising convoluted plots. On being quizzed about the absence of the twists and turns of genre in her work, she replied: “If I want a plot I’ll watch Dallas.” This understanding that plot and story are not the same, that plot is not appropriate to every narrative while story is indispensable to all, propels the book forward and permits a richer, more satisfying exploration of her subjects to take place. So, although there are chapters here, paragraph breaks, section ends etc, there is no real reason for them. The narrator’s thoughts follow their own insomnia-infused logic, jumping easily across space and time, connected only by the slimmest of associative threads…"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

I couldn’t help thinking of Proust’s desire to make time live again, to trace the inner story of his narrator as experience created it. This is what happens here, but the view is outward from the narrator, not inward. Here are beautiful, empathetic portraits of the people her path has crossed, ranging from impoverished ageing women living in boarding houses to New York intellectuals, the great Billie Holiday herself with her luminous self-destruction. In a cheap New York boarding house with a notice in the bathroom many times underlined: Please Clean This Tub After Using, there is Hardwick’s fellow tenant, Miss Lavore, large and strong and homely and in her late fifties who went dancing after work every night as a member of the ten-year Arthur Murray Club. There is the poverty-stricken Communist family in the Kentucky town where she grew up: They were poor as their ancestors before them, never once brushed by the wing of comfort or savings, never once even on the middle of the ladder, teetering there hopefully. Instead they lived in a dreaming world of ideas that had come to them almost like a missent letter… There is a wonderful section about the maids and cleaning women she has known. And What has happened to the impertinent music teacher, the failed mezzo, who used to receive her pupils with sonorous black looks, sizing them up as if they were a bundle of remaindered goods asking to be patched together for use?

I loved this book. Only 128 pages, but it contains a myriad of stories, fragments of lives that she releases into your imagination. And Hardwick’s mind is a lovely place to be: wise, kind, responsive, always working towards clarity. Now I’m going to read her collected essays. ...more

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The Unwilding
by Marina Kemp

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There are plenty of books that have as their centre a charismatic artist (always male) who controls his family simply by the force of his ego. We’re used to reading about his casual disregard for a self-effacing wife and the way the very being of his There are plenty of books that have as their centre a charismatic artist (always male) who controls his family simply by the force of his ego. We’re used to reading about his casual disregard for a self-effacing wife and the way the very being of his children is distorted, so that they can never develop into what they might have been out of his shade. Often enough, these children continue to adore their father even when an adult perspective should show them how contemptible he is. The highly-successful novelist Don Travers is such a man. The particular achievement of this book is to keep a range of perspectives playing across him, like beams from searchlights playing across a figure. The complicated network of relationships between all the people who have come under his influence is Kemp’s material. And throughout the novel runs the children’s excuse for him: “He’s not an ordinary man.”

The first part of the story is set in the rambling Sicilian country house that the Travers family rents every summer. Don gathers around him confident, worldly friends, with the odd ingenue like the young writer Zoe who has just published her first book. The four children, ranging from 10 to 19, run wild, and in the background is Don’s wife Lydia, quietly working in the kitchen to produce enormous meals that are simply expected of her. Lydia is a non-person: people say vaguely, “She’s American, isn’t she?” Yet we feel that she is the steady centre of the children’s emotional lives.

We see all this through the eyes of the youngest child, Nemony, alternating with Zoe’s narrative as she hovers awkwardly on the fringe of this charmed circle. In the harsh Sicilian heat tensions are building so it’s no surprise when the holiday and the family are blown apart – yes, of course by a stupid sexual act that’s bitterly regretted but, it seems, irreparable. The next time we see Nemony and Zoe it’s twenty years later and two family members are dead. Not Don, of course, who remains physically and emotionally invulnerable. Nemony, the child who noticed everything, sees him for what he is, and is horrified that her siblings don’t. They are the ones who say,“He’s not an ordinary man.” This is where the “unwilding” of the title comes in; she sees people who were once free spirits tamed in their subservience to the artist.

Now Zoe, once the protegée, is writing a book based on the family, exposing Don’s selfishness and cruelty and burrowing into the secrets of Lydia’s background. This is what authors do, isn’t it? In their minds the artistic impulse justifies the plundering of others’ lives. Zoe and Nemony argue about this:

I can’t choose what I write, she says, following her script. You of all people know: this is what writers do. Stories inhabit us, they catch our imagination in their net –and that’s it, we write.

But Nemony knows the mean and selfish spirit behind the works of a man whose books were praised for the deep humanity of his treatment of human suffering.

You say it’s just what writers do, as if that justifies it. But I don’t believe it does. It’s parasitical. I always thought that about my father and I think it about this too.

Zoe’s work is offset by a harsh account of Lydia’s history as discovered by the oldest daughter Tree, a damaged spirit in search of the solidity and calm she associates with her mother. Zoe has been to the West Virginian community where Lydia grew up to learn Lydia’s story, as Tree once did. The harrowing description of Tree’s experiences there makes Zoe’s book seem another form of “unwilding”, reducing human suffering to artistic “material”. This is just what Don did. In the end Zoe’s justification for herself seems to be the same: “I’m not an ordinary woman.”

So this is really a book about what writers do with other people’s lives. You’ll have your own views about that, and Marina Kemp leaves you to them. But for all its apparent simple-mindedness, there’s a lot to be said for the Puritan saying Lydia passed on to her children: Kindness is king. ...more

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Mona Acts Out
by Mischa Berlinski (Goodreads Author)

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"And only here did Mona, who had been doing the entire speech for Milton on a single lungful of stale audition room air, take her first breath. With the breath, a flicker of happiness, as welcome as it was unexpected, surprised her. Ths was Shakespea "And only here did Mona, who had been doing the entire speech for Milton on a single lungful of stale audition room air, take her first breath. With the breath, a flicker of happiness, as welcome as it was unexpected, surprised her. Ths was Shakespeare’s gift. If you said the lines and played the meter and breathed where he told you to breathe and said the words as best you understood them, the breath would lead you and you would feel things. The words would master you even as you mastered them, and you would become an empty vehicle by which that brain which first quilled them out in a flea-infested London attic reached those eager brains sitting in front of you. Then an audience of a thousand or an audience of just Milton Katz would breathe with you, hold their breath when you held yours, and they would feel things too. There was nothing else in the world that mattered half so much to Mona as the experience of standing onstage saying these words."

And there’s nobody but Milton Katz, the wild genius who set up the theatre group Disorder’d Rabble who understands this the same way and can bring this gift out in Mona. That’s why when the New York Times publishes a story about his long history of seducing young actresses and he is fired from the company he set up and has directed for 50 years, Mona is torn:

When the company squabbled over his reputation she was an out-and-out unabashed Miltophile. Asked to justify her debt to the man, she would have spread her arms and said, “Milton made me.” But she was happier, she had discovered, with Milton out of her life.

As to his sexual predatoriness, she argues to herself that he is a natural predator, like a lion, and his failings are part of a psyche that makes him able to do what no more controlled man could do. Still, she has to admit that he has ruined more than one life.

This very topical issue is dealt with with a rare intelligence and nuance in this wonderful novel. It’s wonderful in its insights into Shakespeare’s plays and the actor’s life. It’s wonderful on the insights middle-age brings to the single-focus commitments of youth. It’s wonderful on the Trump question. Here’s Mona’s father-in-law who is utterly committed to the belief that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays:

"Bruce was the only person in Mona’s orbit who admitted that he had voted for Donald Trump, whom he saw as an ally in his battle over the authorship question. Not that Donald Trump cared who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare, mind you. Not even Bruce thought that. But Bruce knew just where Donald Trump would stand on the issue if he were to take a stand. Donald Trump would not be afraid of the Stratfordians, of their snootiness and their endless bullying. Bruce was sick of living in a country where you weren’t allowed to think what you wanted to think. Bruce had done his research, he had thought a lot about the question, and he was tired of people like Hillary Clinton making fun of him because he’d arrived at his own conclusions."

It’s also very funny, and has a great dog character. Mona flees her house on Thanksgiving, high from popping pills and vaping cannabis oil she suspects may have been laced with “hallucinogenic toad drippings” when she can’t stand any more talk about Milton Katz or Donald Trump. With Barney the dog as her companion she wanders the streets, mentally reliving past triumphs, embarrassments and the choices she’s made until finally she ends up at Milton’s house. With her return home, the whole thing comes together with the richness and rightness of the end of one of those Shakespearean plays where all is reconciled. 'Measure for Measure' is a constant theme but I thought also of 'The Winter’s Tale'. I could go on and on about the way the book brings to life plays you thought you knew, how much it makes you care about them, the insights it gives you into their characters. Milton says this to Mona when she is overwhelmed by the prospect of playing Cleopatra:

Just don’t forget that she hasn’t read the play. She doesn’t know how it’s all going to end. Don’t let her give up hope.

If you could give a piece of advice to any young actor playing no matter what part, this would be it. Just don’t forget your character hasn’t read the play.

I loved this book on so many fronts. Get your paws on it if you can. ...more

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Pnin
by Vladimir Nabokov

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Professor Tomofey Pnin’s CV:

"Born in St Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918…Completed university education in Prague. Was connected with various scientific organisations…Well, to make a long story very short Professor Tomofey Pnin’s CV:

"Born in St Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918…Completed university education in Prague. Was connected with various scientific organisations…Well, to make a long story very short: habitated in Paris from 1925, abandoned France at beginning of Hitler war. Is now here. Is American citizen. Is teaching Russian and such subjects at Vandal College. From Hagen, Head of German Department, obtainable all reference."

We first see this comical figure on the train on his way to deliver a lecture on a campus some hours away. He becomes embroiled in a sequence of mishaps ranging from a misread timetable to an imprisoned suitcase to the confusion of his lecture notes with a student’s essay. Reading this is like watching Charlie Chaplin or Stan Laurel innocently setting forth on an adventure that soon has you groaning and covering your eyes. But Pnin, as you’d expect from Nabokov, is far more than the comic misadventures of a complicated European in a provincial American university. The joke is more on America than it is on Pnin, and the comedy gets tricky as you realise the involvement of the narrator himself (a figure very like Nabokov) in the life of Pnin. This small book (170 pages) is a mourning for a lost culture, and a canny observation of a culture that is still making itself – America, with its tides of incomers from different backgrounds, its backwaters of British influence and its childlike belief in itself.

If Pnin mangles the English language, Nabokov is a master of it. This is Pnin in the library at the end of a day’s work:

"Doffing his spectacles he rubbed with the knuckles of the hand that held them his naked and tired eyes and, still in thought, fixed his mild gaze on the window above, where, gradually, through his dissolving meditation, there appeared the violet-blue air of dusk, silver-tooled by the reflection of the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, and, among spidery black twigs, a mirrored row of bright book spines."

Pnin’s encounter with a squirrel:

"A squirrel under a tree had seen Pnin on the path. In one sinuous, tendril-like movement, the intelligent animal climbed up to the brim of a drinking fountain and, as Pnin apprached, thrust its oval face toward him with a rather coarse sputtering sounds, its cheeks puffed out. Pnin understood and after some fumbling he found what had to be pressed for the necessary results. Eyeing him with contempt, the thirsty rodent forthwith began to sample the stocky sparkling pillar of water…"

An unwanted memory of youth:

"In a haze of sunshine – sunshine projecting in vaporous shafts between the white boles of birches, drenching the pendulous foliage, trembling in eyelets along the bark, dripping on to the long grass, shining and smoking among the ghosts of racemose bird cherries in scumbled bloom – a Russian wildwood enveloped the rambler. It was traversed by an old forest road with two soft furrows and a continuous traffic of mushrooms and daisies. The rambler still followed in mind that road as he trudged back to his anachronistic lodings. He was again the youth who had walked through these woods with a fat book under his arm; the track emerged into the romantic, free, beloved radiance of a great field unmowed by time (the horses galloping away and tossing their silver manes among the tall flowers) as drowsiness overcame Pnin…."

This is the life hidden behind the CV details: Born in St Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918. Over and over again Nabokov achieves this rich and beautiful flowering from the banal and even ridiculous detail of Pnin’s everyday life.

It’s interesting that the “grown-ups” in this book are mostly people of European background. They don’t see Pnin as a joke because they understand the upheavals of history he’s lived through. Those who do see him as a joke don’t feel the same way about his brilliant and successful compatriot (the Nabokov figure) a prominent Anglo-Russian writer with fluent English. You can see the two figures as two versions of the same man – the lucky one and the unlucky, the admired and the ridiculous. And both the products of a rich culture whose history is of little interest to the inhabitants of the new world.

A small book with tremendous range and depth. As the Guardian blurb says: "Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way the masters can – to laughter that is nearer to tears."

And for those who enjoy the game when an author openly plays with the idea that this is a fiction and that he’s in charge of the characters there’s a final Nabokovian joke. The Nabokov figure is coming to Pnin’s university and offers him any job he wants; Pnin refuses. “I will never work under him”, he says. So, in the end, the character escapes from the author and drives off into his future, whatever that might be, in a little blue car packed with many books and a small white dog. ...more

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Still Lives
by Maria Hummel (Goodreads Author)

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You’ll especially enjoy this if you like to read about the dirty little secrets of the art world.

It’s the opening night of the Rocque Museum’s exhibition of Kim Lord’s latest work Still Lives, in which she portrays herself as a series of murdered wo You’ll especially enjoy this if you like to read about the dirty little secrets of the art world.

It’s the opening night of the Rocque Museum’s exhibition of Kim Lord’s latest work Still Lives, in which she portrays herself as a series of murdered women, the victims of male serial killers. Kim Lord specialises in confronting work like this. In her first exhibition she showed paintings set in a brothel, with herself costumed as both the pimp and the sex worker. Maggie Richter edits the museum’s catalogues; she also happens to be the discarded ex-partner of the man who is currently Kim Lord’s lover. She witnesses the behind-the-scenes panic as Kim Lord fails to show up for her show and remains missing in the days that follow.

Even though this is a crime novel, the crime itself is not the main interest. What has happened to Kim occupies the reader less than the interplay of personalities that make up Maggie’s world. Running through it all, because of the nature of Kim’s work, is an undercurrent of violence against women, and of the way art can hover on the fringes of voyeurism and titillation. Is the artist who claims to be making us think about violence simply using its dark power as a means of self-promotion? The other interesting question here is, what powers the world of art – artists, or collectors? A collector may choose to buy up all the works of a controversial new artist (as Saatchi did with Damien Hirst’s early works) at very high prices, intending to create a market for that artist that will bring the collector big profits further down the line. So big names are created and the world of art becomes the world of manipulation for profit.

Various people at the Rocque Museum have fingers in this valuable pie, and when Maggie decides to find out what has happened to Kim she finds out far more than is good for her own safety. The shiny surface of the fashionable art world cracks apart. She realises that even those who look like effortless high achievers have traumas in their lives they never speak about – as does she. Once she wanted to become a journalist, but her first work in that field resulted in the death of a young girl, and she’s been in flight from that sense of guilt ever since.

Maggie is a compelling narrator, and the story hums along, always interesting and thought-provoking. The guilty party and the motivation are cunningly concealed, but when they start to reveal themselves everything comes together in a way that surprises but makes sense on both levels, personal and thematic. The nuanced conclusion leaves Maggie battered but cautiously hopeful. ...more

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Outside Looking In
by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Goodreads Author)

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T. Coraghessan Boyle is known for fiction focusing on historical figures: John Harvey Kellogg, Frank Wright and Alfred Kinsey. This time he’s looking at Timothy Leary and his hallucinogenic drug experiments in the 1960s. Leary was introduced to hallu T. Coraghessan Boyle is known for fiction focusing on historical figures: John Harvey Kellogg, Frank Wright and Alfred Kinsey. This time he’s looking at Timothy Leary and his hallucinogenic drug experiments in the 1960s. Leary was introduced to hallucinogens via psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico and redirected his research interests from personality studies to the effects of hallucinogens on human consciousness. Now that psychodelic drugs are being used in the treatment of mental illness – which was one of Leary’s original justifications for his research – it’s interesting to think back over this history.

One claim is that these drugs are “entheogens”, that is, they allow you to see God.

“If God is as simple as altering the chemistry of the brain, what does that mean for our world religions? Is there anything outside of us? Or is it all inside of us? And is it all hormonal and brain functions?” Boyle asks. This turns out to be too big a question for the book to answer.

Leary in Outside Looking In is the stereotypical charismatic personality, with a devoted following among his Harvard students, who all became subjects in his unorthodox experiments with LSD. Leary was sacked from Harvard because of the lack of scientific control in his experiments and ended up establishing a commune in a huge house lent to him by a wealthy woman lover. What was originally experimental psychology ended up being a hedonistic lifestyle that served Leary himself above all. The book ends on this note:

' “Tell me you’ve been there,” says his devotee Fitz, “Tell me you’ve seen God”……

He winked. Grinned. Leaned over the cradle of his knees and stretched out his hand.

“Fuck God,” he said, “Let’s get high.” '

We follow the earnest postgrad student Fitz and his wife Joanie as they become more and more involved in the world Leary creates. Boyle is a lively writer, but the real interest of the book comes from the actual history of Leary, and Fitz and Joanie simply serve as exemplars of what happens to people who get caught up in this world. So it all feels a bit like the playing-out of a story we already know. I suppose this is the hazard in basing your fiction on a real person with such a high-voltage story, and a story that’s well-known – you have to add something, either by the brilliance of your style or the range of your imagination. Think of Lincoln In The Bardo. Outside Looking In is workmanlike and interesting, but that’s about it. ...more

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Yellowface
by R.F. Kuang (Goodreads Author)

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I enjoyed Yellowface a lot. Then I discovered that while some people have seen it as clever and entertaining (as I did) others have taken a very po-faced view of its take on racial authenticity and cultural appropriation. To these earnest souls I say I enjoyed Yellowface a lot. Then I discovered that while some people have seen it as clever and entertaining (as I did) others have taken a very po-faced view of its take on racial authenticity and cultural appropriation. To these earnest souls I say, “Lighten up.”

The joke is, June Hayward, a white woman, steals the book of Athena Liu, an Asian woman, giving the impression that she herself is Chinese-American; Rebecca Kuang, a Chinese-American woman, speaks in the voice of the white woman who steals an Asian woman’s book. Cultural appropriation, anyone? June is not an attractive character and I think that’s quite deliberate. It’s very easy to be drawn into the way of thinking of someone sympathetic, but it’s quite a trick to draw your readers into the thinking of someone unlikeable so cleverly that from time to time they find themselves actually agreeing with her. To tell the truth, I kind of wanted June to get away with pinching Athena’s novel. This is because of the extremely cynical attitude to the publishing industry that permeates the book:

"You enjoy this delightful waterfall of attention when your book is the latest breakout success. You dominate the cultural conversation. You possess the literary equivalent of the hot hand. Everyone wants to interview you. Everyone wants you to blurb their book or host their launch even., Everything you say matters. If you utter a hot take about the writing process, about other books, or even about life itself, people take your word as gospel. If you recommend a book on social media, people actually drive out that day to get it.

But your time in the spotlight never lasts. I’ve seen people who were massive bestsellers not even six years ago, sitting alone and forlorn and neglected at signing tables while lines stretched around the corner for their younger, hotter peers. It’s hard to reach such a pinnacle of literary permanence that you remain a household name for years, decades past your latest release. Only a handful of Nobel Prize winners can get away with that. The rest of us have to keep racing along the hamster wheel of relevance."

Notice that the emphasis is on being “a massive bestseller”. And these are the terms in which June’s publishers speak. Is it surprising that she talks herself into believing that she deserves the credit for the book because she did so much work to make an unwieldy first draft into a bestseller?

If ownership of your own artistic product doesn’t matter, it’s a nice irony that June, having stolen Athena’s voice, can’t find her own again. The reader can’t help thinking that that’s because June is actually not a very good writer, but she would prefer to think that Athena is haunting her, or that her artistic flow is the victim of the mauling she undergoes in the Twitterverse when doubts arise about her authorship. I enjoyed the Twitter theme:

"But Twitter is real life: it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online you can tune into all the hot gossip even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself, online you can discover that the current literary star is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled, forever."

This is actually what happens when the Twitterverse moves on from attacking June as a plagiarist to attacking Athena herself:

"Athena, @NoHeroesNoGods concludes, was out of touch with the most radical Asian diaspora movement, Athena was not a real Marxist; she was a champagne socialist at best. Athena lied about her family history to make it seem more tragic than it was – for convenience, for claims to authenticity, for attention….

Kimberley Deng…posts an hour-long video dissecting “problematic” lines in each one of Athena’s books. (Athena once wrote about a love-interest’s “almond-shaped eyes,” which buys into Western standards of beauty and the objectification of Asian women.)"

You can see why Yellowface is fun. It delivers a sugar-hit by tapping into all our cynicism about the publishing industry (with a side-swipe at the film industry, quoting Roland Barthes to justify hacking the story about to make it a better vehicle for a big star or a mass audience) and the mindless hysteria of the social media world.

In the literary world, racial authenticity and cultural appropriation have become self-propagating issues – the snakes that eat their own tails. I say, let Rebecca Kuang have her fun with them. ...more

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The Hemingway Thief
by Shaun Harris

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The Holy Grail is Ernest Hemingway’s stolen suitcase full of first drafts. The setting is a run-down hotel in a Mexican town with a population of sixty people and ninety-two stray dogs. The dramatis personae are a writer whose best-sellers feature Al The Holy Grail is Ernest Hemingway’s stolen suitcase full of first drafts. The setting is a run-down hotel in a Mexican town with a population of sixty people and ninety-two stray dogs. The dramatis personae are a writer whose best-sellers feature Alastair McMerkin, the Scottish vampire detective, a conman, a couple of hitmen, an ex-cop with a murky past, an odd-job man who is surprisingly handy with a gun, a shady dealer in first editions, and a hired killer called Pieta.

Henry Cooper (Coop) has come to Pendira to write a real book. He’s made lots of money out of the Alastair McMerkin books (written under the pseudonym Toulouse Velour) but he’s never got over the scathing reviews of his first novel, pre-McMerkin:

"The book critic for the Washington Post suggested my novel made a solid case to reconsider book-burning. The Chicago Reader merely printed the first page with the suggestion it be used to line birdcages… "

An even deeper wound is his father’s comment on his first novel: "It’s no John Grisham." Now he’s planning to kill off McMerkin and write a novel" bereft of Scots, vampires, and genital euphemisms. Even better than John Grisham."

Life is quiet in the Hotel Baja until two thugs try to abduct a young man who’s just checked in under an obviously fake name. They’ve been sent to get him because he’s stolen a first draft of a Hemingway novel, but there’s even more to it. He’s the grandson of the man who’s said to have stolen Hemingway’s suitcase in 1922 and brought it to Mexico. Henry is sucked into a fast and furious hunt for the suitcase, pursued across Mexico by the sinister book-dealer and the hired killer Pieta. The ex-cop Grady and the mysterious odd-job man Digby, in a sly homage to old-fashioned Wild West heroes, pull off miraculous rescues in apparently desperate situations, and it all comes to a head in an old Apache stronghold on the top of the mesa. Throw in a whole lot of literary jokes and cynical worldly wisdom and you have a fizzing crackling brew that will keep you on the hook and give you lots of laughs. The macho personality of Hemingway is part of the joke, but I don’t think old Ernest, who took himself very seriously, would be laughing at this takedown.

Clever, funny, highly original – yes, Coop, worthy of John Grisham. ...more

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	Writing is Easy by Gert Loveday, Joan Kerr (Goodreads Author) 4.08 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 2013 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Triptych poets. - Issue 3. by P.S. Cottier, Joan Kerr (Goodreads Author), J.C. Inman it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2012	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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