Joan Kerr ( of Writing is Easy)

Joan Kerr rated a book liked it Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession (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
"Hungry Paul had been blessed with a mental stillness which had become his natural state over the years. His mind worked perfectly fine and he had all the faculties of a healthy, if slightly unorthodox, man of his age. He just had no interest in, or ...more
May 24, 2026 03:03AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joan Kerr rated a book liked it Panenka by Ronan Hession (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
Yes, the wrong kick in football can ruin your life. That’s what happened to Joseph, known for the last 25 years as Panenka after the kick that cost his team a vital victory and caused them to be relegated. "The manner of the penalty miss had astonishe ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book really liked it The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz	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 Passenger" is absolutely extraordinary. It’s the story of a wealthy Berlin businessman, Otto Silbermann, as he tries in the days afer Kristallnacht to organise a way out of Germany for himself and his wife. Used to successful negotiations, he do ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book liked it One of Us by Elizabeth Day	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
We met Martin Gilmour and his school friend Ben Fitzmaurice in Elizabeth Day’s earlier book "The Party", which deals with an “incident” at Ben’s 40th birthday party after which relations between them were broken off. It’s seven years later, and Marti ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book really liked it What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (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
There’s nobody like Ian McEwan for the evocation of the Britain of rich pastures, country lanes plunging between flowering hedgerows, old pathways running through dappled woods, the spire of the village church seen in the distance over chequered fiel ...more
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Joan Kerr rated a book liked it Nonesuch by Francis Spufford (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
"December saw the weather turn cold. Sharp frosts at morning and evening; an edge like a blade to the winds off the river; the coal smoke coagulating to a blue layer near the ground that moved like a tarry syrup and tasted like one too. On clear nigh ...more
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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
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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

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Leonard and Hungry Paul
by Ronan Hession (Goodreads Author)

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"Hungry Paul had been blessed with a mental stillness which had become his natural state over the years. His mind worked perfectly fine and he had all the faculties of a healthy, if slightly unorthodox, man of his age. He just had no interest in, or "Hungry Paul had been blessed with a mental stillness which had become his natural state over the years. His mind worked perfectly fine and he had all the faculties of a healthy, if slightly unorthodox, man of his age. He just had no interest in, or capacity for, mental chatter. He had no internal narrator. When he saw a dog he just saw a dog, without his mind adding that it should be on a lead or that its tongue was hanging out like a rasher. When he heard an ambulance siren he just heard an ambulance siren, without noting its Doppler effect or wondering if it was a real emergency or just the driver running late for dinner. And it is in this way that Hungry Paul maintained a natural clarity throughout his day, and stayed apart from the trouble that the world will undoubtedly make for those who look for it."

What a relief and a pleasure it was to read "Leonard and Hungry Paul" straight after the angst of "Some Tests". Here we have two men who are impervious to the pressure to be like everyone else, two calm and thoughtful people who let the world come to them in all its noise and blather and are not thrown off balance. Yet they are men who would be considered by the general rules of our society failures. Both are in their thirties, living with their parents, one of them only casually employed and the other conscientiously doing work that other people take the credit for.

"Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth", the book begins.

Yes, like me you’ll have stopped and gone back to check you’ve read that right.

"His mother looked after everyone in her life as though they were her garden birds: that is to say, with unconditional pleasure and generosity."

Leonard continues to live with her simply because they like each other; she is part of the uncrowded bandwidth of his life. But she dies at the beginning of the book – the doctor says her heart has “simply run out of beats”. And for the first time Leonard feels lonely. He tells his friend Paul that he feels his life is shrinking, he needs to “open the doors and windows of my life a little”. This is what happens as the book goes on.

His friend Hungry Paul is a more relaxed character, perfectly self-contained but warm, intelligent and self-aware. The trick he says is to know how much of the world to let in, without being overwhelmed. He doesn’t go looking for it, as Leonard does, but his essential Paulness opens up a surprising place for him in the world.

The charm of both stories is that Leonard and Paul continue to be themselves, untroubled by anyone else’s judgment or standards, using their talents, enjoying their idiosyncratic interests, sharing friendship. It’s funny, witty and thoughtful. ...more

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Panenka
by Ronan Hession (Goodreads Author)

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Yes, the wrong kick in football can ruin your life. That’s what happened to Joseph, known for the last 25 years as Panenka after the kick that cost his team a vital victory and caused them to be relegated.

"The manner of the penalty miss had astonishe Yes, the wrong kick in football can ruin your life. That’s what happened to Joseph, known for the last 25 years as Panenka after the kick that cost his team a vital victory and caused them to be relegated.

"The manner of the penalty miss had astonished the crowd as if by bearing witness to it they had become acomplices. The hubris of it, the inappropriateness of it, the vanity of it, the betrayal of it. Yes, the betrayal of it. Of all the possible words, it was betrayal that those thousands of fans, in one wildfire of judgment, had settled upon to describe what they were suffering….

Is there any way to capture accurately the sound that Panenka heard that afternoon when the whistle definitively locked in the consequences of his actions for all time? It was a bellowing cacophony of aggression, which, as he crouched alone in the centre circle, left him like a small fishing boat among rolling, cliff-face waves."

This isn’t the premier league or the World Cup, but it’s a tragedy as great for the star player as if it had been. Locked in stony grief, he loses his wife and child when she leaves, unable to bear the suffering he won’t share. All these years later, he knows that those who loved him most had lost the most.

When we meet him now his daughter Marie-Claire and her little boy Arthur have come to live with him and he has a precious and undeserved second chance to live a family from the inside. Arthur is a great kid. Here he is reassuring his father Vincent:

“Is anyone bullying you?”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure? You can always tell me. Daddies have big ears for listening.”

“I said nope,” whispered Arthur.

“Sure?” Vincent whispered back.

“Yes!” Arthur shouted, smiling. “Why are people always asking me about bullies? Adults are obsessed with bullies. Teachers keep talking about them, mama keeps talking about them, Why are you so terrified of bullies? They’re just kids.”

But Joseph is suffering from ferocious headaches and is told that he has an inoperable growth in his brain. Does this sound like cliché? Look what Hession does with it. He shifts our attention to other lives: to BABA (he claims to have two degrees and ostentatiously reads Montaigne in the bar) and Anthony, the lonely regulars in Vincent’s bar, arguing about whether travel broadens the mind, if people with tattoos are aggressive, or whether swimming is a healthy activity, to Marie-Claire’s workplace where she’s struggling with a group of male colleagues resentful that she’s been made their manager, to Vincent himself hoping that Marie-Claire will come back to him. Nobody’s tragedy is the centre of the world and sometimes you have to realise some things just aren’t fixable and have to be fitted into your life in some way. The prospect of a new relationship comes into Panenka’s life when he meets Esther, who understands that as well as he does.

Perhaps it’s the nature of the times that makes this generous-hearted author such a welcome find. In his first book Leonard and Hungry Paul and now in Panenka Rónán Hession deals with the lives of insignificant people in small towns. There are no heroes or villains and no grand dramas; the perplexities and pleasures of ordinary life are allowed room to play themselves out with a deceptive ingenuousness. Deceptive, because there’s a lot of skill behind the apparent simplicity. There’s always the risk that such good-hearted books fall over the edge into sentimentality. This doesn’t happen because Hession’s characters are shaped with such intelligent restraint, humour and respect. Just as good as Leonard and Hungry Paul. ...more

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The Passenger
by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

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"The Passenger" is absolutely extraordinary. It’s the story of a wealthy Berlin businessman, Otto Silbermann, as he tries in the days afer Kristallnacht to organise a way out of Germany for himself and his wife. Used to successful negotiations, he do "The Passenger" is absolutely extraordinary. It’s the story of a wealthy Berlin businessman, Otto Silbermann, as he tries in the days afer Kristallnacht to organise a way out of Germany for himself and his wife. Used to successful negotiations, he doesn’t at first realise that he’s no longer in a position to negotiate. His son Eduard in Paris has been trying in vain to get visas for them, and up till now Otto has just been annoyed at his son’s ineptitude. But now he sees Jews are being arrested wholesale. Planning to sell his apartment to a business acquaintance, he asks 90,000 marks and ends up having to settle for 15,000 as the buyer reminds him, “I’m not even sure if it’s still possible to buy from Jews…. It’s too risky for me. I pay for a place and end up not getting it. The government has in mind all sorts of things for you Jews.”

Silbermann flees his apartment when the SS come hammering on the door and sets off on the train to find his business partner, a man he has helped a lot, convinced that he’ll find help in return. He’s fortunate that he’s blond and Aryan-looking; anyone who “looks Jewish” is shunned at best and arrested at worst. The remarkable thing about the book is its tone; it isn’t overwrought and it doesn’t demonise anyone. It simply observes, as Silbermann does, how life unfolds on a day-to-day basis when the conditions of life have changed so radically and yet so simply; there’s nothing complicated about the new rule that puts Jewish people in a category all by themselves, outside normal humanity. People react to this in different ways: some pragmatically, like the buyer of Silbermann’s flat, some emotionally, enjoying their power over a group that was previously envied for its wealth and influence, some kindly or regretfully, some just following what others do, and some, like the sympathetic woman Silbermann meets on the train, with no understanding of what this actually means for the human beings affected. This woman asks him why the Jews “put up with all this” and says in his situation, “I would simply start living as though each day were my last, and I would get more out of a single day than everyone else gets out of a whole year.”

Silbermann spends the rest of the book on a train, travelling back and forth, Berlin to Hamburg, Hamburg to Dresden, Dresden back to Berlin, at first with the idea of escape and them simply locked into the existential restlessness of a life that has lost all its scaffolding, his reasonable habits of mind challenged again and again by the surreal reality of everyday life in Nazi Germany.

Ulrich Boschwitz and his mother left Nazi Germany in 1935, first for Sweden, then Paris, Belgium and finally to England and it was there that the 24-year old wrote The Passenger, in four weeks. Deported to Australia in the infamous Dunera later in the war, he was on his way back to England when their ship was torpedoed with the loss of all. He was 27. It took more than 70 years for the original manuscript to be rediscovered and published. As Andre Aciman says in his introduction:

"What Boschwitz saw clearly enough was the utter despoliation of one’s identity, of one’s trust in the world, and ultimately of one’s very humanity….How could he have known this so early in the tragedy?"

A wonderful book A very sobering read. ...more

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One of Us
by Elizabeth Day

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We met Martin Gilmour and his school friend Ben Fitzmaurice in Elizabeth Day’s earlier book "The Party", which deals with an “incident” at Ben’s 40th birthday party after which relations between them were broken off. It’s seven years later, and Marti We met Martin Gilmour and his school friend Ben Fitzmaurice in Elizabeth Day’s earlier book "The Party", which deals with an “incident” at Ben’s 40th birthday party after which relations between them were broken off. It’s seven years later, and Martin is surprised to receive an invitation to a memorial service for Ben’s sister Fliss, who has died in an accident in Bali. So he finds himself back at the Fitzmaurice stately house, bringing back memories of all the time he spent there in the past vainly trying to become one of them – he the common little scholarship boy and Ben the aristocratic golden boy who transformed Martin’s life by becoming his friend at school. Ben is now a cabinet minister and spoken of as the next Prime Minister; Martin is a lecturer at a down-market university, currently suspended and sentenced to a period of counselling to resolve his “cultural sensitivity issues” after he used the term “Orientalism” in his lectures on Monet.

Martin is disappointed to find it’s Ben’s wife Serena, not Ben himself, who invited him and bitterly hurt to find himself still the outsider, tolerated slightly mockingly by Ben. Martin once saved Ben from a criminal charge by claiming to be the driver of a car in which the drunken Ben killed a girl; the family paid him off for this, and as far as Ben’s concerned it’s forgotten. Not to Martin, though; he acted out of love for Ben – a love that is not platonic but he never realised that everyone knows this and it’s a bit of an in-joke among Ben and his friends. The more time he spends with the family the more his disgust for their way of life, which he once longed to be part of, grows, as does his resentment at Ben’s effortless path through life. Times are changing, though, even in Ben’s family. His daughter is an environmental activist who despises her father’s policies and who comes across some damning information that will destroy his political career. The person she shares this with is Martin. What will he do?

I didn’t think this was as good as "The Party", which was masterful in creating in Martin a very complex character made up in equal parts of sensitivity and calculation and putting him at the centre of the novel like the spider at the centre of the web. The action in this book is given from several different perspectives and doesn’t have the same psychological drive. At the heart of it, as it was in The Party, is the casual born-to-rule callousness of aristocratic young men like Ben Fitzmaurice, but there’s a wider political lens. This doesn’t feel particularly new; in fact it’s a pretty accurate picture of the reality of British politics and I think we know enough about that. Elizabeth Day is always worth reading, though; her pictures of the slimy creatures at the heart of power are sharp and entertaining, even if you come away from it all feeling rather depressed.

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What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan (Goodreads Author)

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There’s nobody like Ian McEwan for the evocation of the Britain of rich pastures, country lanes plunging between flowering hedgerows, old pathways running through dappled woods, the spire of the village church seen in the distance over chequered fiel There’s nobody like Ian McEwan for the evocation of the Britain of rich pastures, country lanes plunging between flowering hedgerows, old pathways running through dappled woods, the spire of the village church seen in the distance over chequered fields, of long rambles, river meadows, little villages of golden stone and manor houses set in century-old gardens. That’s the Britain Thomas Metcalfe, an insignificant academic in the insignificant field of the humanities in the Britain of 2119, longs for. A time when you could walk for miles across the fields and along the rivers, when food was rich, fresh and abundant and everything you didn’t produce could be flown in from the other side of the world. The Britain of 2119 is an archipelago, a series of small islands that can only be traversed by water. The ancient cities are drowned and the population has been halved. Gone is the glorious variety of the world we know today – what brilliant invention and bone-headed greed…such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance…they were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away…

It is not simply rising sea-levels that have changed the world, but catastrophic global instability caused by a combination of climate change, toxic religious and nationalist extremism and the unchecked use of AI as a means of war. The ultimate catastrophe was when a Russian hydrogen bomb aimed at US military installations in Mexico fell short and dropped into the ocean, creating tsunamis that wiped out three-quarters of the Atlantic-facing populations. More than 200 million died.

"However, none of the twenty-first century’s nuclear exchanges led to total war and human extinction. There was our morsel of consolation. We were not so irrational after all."

In this new world where thousands of years of cultural expression have been swept away in the inundation of the great libraries, leaving only digital records, there is a nostalgia for a golden age of poetry, and here the golden age is represented by the poet Francis Blundy, and in particular his 2014 poem, “A Corona For Vivien”. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave it represented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry. The thing is, the poem, after one celebrated reading, has been lost for 100 years. Thomas’s project is to find it, by exhaustive examination of all the sources, including the journals of Francis’s wife Vivien. The first part of the book is the story of Thomas’ search; the second part is told from a completely different point of view.

As I describe it, the book sounds rather chilly and theoretical. It isn’t. It’s a real achievement to combine a theme of dystopia with such human warmth and intelligence, such subtle observation of the ebb and flow of human relationships. The sections on Vivien Blundy’s first marriage to Percy, a loveable free-spirited giant who died young from Alzheimer’s Disease, are just wonderful. As I read, seeing how McEwan weaves such big intellectual themes with the minutiae of people’s everyday lives, I had the rare sensation of being in the hands of a master. And isn’t he absolutely right in his description of the way we live today, as Thomas’s wife Rose puts it: "I exaggerated the vitality and beauty of the past and ignored its squalor and cruelty and morbid greed. If I was transported back there I would loathe it. The stupidity and waste would suffocate me or make me insane. So would the nastiness of soial media, then run for profit rather than as a public service. What, she demanded, of the self-serving shortsightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders – take your pick – and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations? What of the people’s careless love of autocrats? How could we overlook or forgive the desolation those times bequeathed, the poisons they left in the oceans, the forests they stole, the soils and rivers they ruined and the Derangement they achowledged but would not prevent? It was all scorched earth, all blithe contempt for the generations to follow."

There’s so much more that I haven’t space to touch on: Vivien’s multi-layered relationship with the “great man” Francis Blundy; the way great artistic skill can mask falsity of feeling; the way a truly loving relationship can make us one with all nature. This last theme is supposedly exemplified in Francis Blundy’s lost poem; in reality it is exemplified in a marvellous poem by John Fuller, “Marston Meadows: A corona for Prue” that McEwan acknowledges as his inspiration for the book. McEwan at his absolute best. ...more

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Nonesuch
by Francis Spufford (Goodreads Author)

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"December saw the weather turn cold. Sharp frosts at morning and evening; an edge like a blade to the winds off the river; the coal smoke coagulating to a blue layer near the ground that moved like a tarry syrup and tasted like one too. On clear nigh "December saw the weather turn cold. Sharp frosts at morning and evening; an edge like a blade to the winds off the river; the coal smoke coagulating to a blue layer near the ground that moved like a tarry syrup and tasted like one too. On clear nights, the moon painted swathes of ice-white over the roofscape of the blacked-out city. The stars, far brighter than she had ever seen them in London, glittterd and trembled in the black air, and the river wrinkled into minute lines of silver, as if the moon were pressing fingerprints into it."

Vintage Spufford. "Nonesuch" is full of such passages, the voice of someone who knows and loves London, with the added richness of an imagination steeped in the history of London in the Blitz. I loved Spufford’s Golden Hill for the richness of the physical and human world it created, the way it brought alive and peopled history. I found the same thing here. Nonesuch is set in London between August 1939 and December 1940, in the leadup to and the first year of the war. Under Churchill’s leadership, Britain declared war on Germany; had Lord Halifax been chosen as Prime Minister, there would have been a negotiated settlement with Hitler. The central drama of the story centres on this: in the time-travelling world of the book, had someone managed to go back in time and eliminate Churchill, Britain would never have been at war with Germany. This is what Lady Lalage Cunningham, a member of the British League of Fascists, is trying to do; our heroine Iris and her lover Geoff are trying to stop her.

Iris has fallen into this by accident. A self-described “bad girl”, given to louche behaviour with idiotic but wealthy males, on a whim she snatches Geoff out from under Lalage’s nose and goes back to the house he shares with his father for a night of passion. Geoff is not at all her usual type of man; he’s gauche and inexperienced, serious and intelligent, and he makes her feel rather bad about her casual seduction of him. Not nearly as bad as she’s soon feeling, though, when she finds herself pursued by a creepy humanoid figure with a face made of newsprint, first seen out of Geoff’s window and then in a dark alley where it attacks her. The problem, it turns out, is that Geoff’s father is holding the records of an “esoteric Order” he used to belong to, and this figure is a guardian appointed to guard the collection. Obviously it sees Iris as a threat. Spufford is quite ingenious in never spelling out just what the Order is all about but he throws enough glitter and quaint tricks round to keep us on side. The crux of the matter is that it is possible by using the secrets of the Order to travel back in time and alter the course of history. For no apparent reason, certain key figures of the British Union of Fascists, including the lethal Lalage, are members of the Order. Whoever finds the way to “Nonesuch” by crossing four mystical bridges accessed through certain monuments of London can ask to be transported back in time. Iris knows she has to stop Lall if she is to stop the assassination of Churchill and the victory of Fascism.

One strand of the book is the video-game quality (very well-done) of Iris and Lall’s encounters as they race to get to Nonesuch. No spoilers here, but when Iris reaches Nonesuch, she learns that Lall has just arrived, and has asked to be transported to

"the side of St James’s Park nearest to the Adniralty, at twenty minutes past five in the afternoon on Friday 29 September in the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Thirty-Nine, Anno Domini."

In other words, outside the Admiralty as Churchill, just chosen as Prime Minister, crosses to his car.

The other strand, that interested me more, is the deepening relationship beween Iris and Geoff, both complex characters with many defences that are challenged by their growing involvement.

I’m still not quite sure how I feel about the end of the book. But the last page promises “to be continued” and Spufford is apparently well-on with writing the next. This is a great read: for me quite a lot of pages to be skimmed over as I did when the esoteric depths got a bit much, but fans of softer scifi will like that, and I really did care about Iris and Geoff. Above all, the sense of the weight of history, the part chance plays in it, and the terrible magnificence of London under the Blitz will stay with me. ...more

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Sister Europe
by Nell Zink

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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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	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
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