The Living Days

by Ananda Devi, Jeffrey Zuckerman (Translator)

A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, a seventy-five-year-old British spinster, and Cub, a thirteen-year-old Jamaican boy from Brixton. Mary clings increasingly to phantoms and fantasies as dementia overtakes her reality, latching on to Cub and channeling all of her remaining energy into their relationship. But her macabre romance with Cub comes to a horrific climax, as white supremacy, poverty, and class conflict explode on the streets of London.

Genres: Fiction, Mauritius, France, Novels

174 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2013

About the author

Ananda Devi is a Mauritian writer. Her novel, Eve de ses décombres, won the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie in 2006, as well as several other prizes. It was adapted for the cinema by Sharvan Anenden and Harrikrisna Anenden. In 2007, Devi received the Certificat d'Honneur Maurice Cagnon du Conseil International d'Études Francophones.[1] She has since won other literary prizes, including the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature française of the Académie française. During 2010 she was bestowed with Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Living Days is translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman from Ananda Devi's original Les jours vivants, originally published in 2013, and is published in translation by the consistently excellent Les Fugitives, who focus on contemporary French writing in translation from authors who are typically award-winning in their native language but not well known in English.

The earlier novel by the same translator/writer/publisher Eve Out of Her Ruins (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) was set in the author's birthplace of Mauritius, and gave a fascinating sight into the side of the island that tourist's don't see.

Here, in a sense, the tables are turned, as this novel is set in London, based on the author's experience of her student days:

J’ai longtemps eu envie d’écrire un roman qui se passe à Londres, la ville de mes années d’étudiante, pluvieuse, froide, mais dont l’énergie est très porteuse du point de vue littéraire.

https://www.jeuneafrique.com/137734/s...

Is it always fascinating to read a novel where one’s own city is seen through another’s eyes, as something of a strange place. Earlier this year I read the striking Lord by Gilberto Noll (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...) where the 55 bus, from Hackney to Oxford Circus, played a key role, the narrator's experience of London circumscribed by places walkable from stops on that route.

Here the 159 bus plays a key role, connecting as it does Marble Arch, gate to the prosperous West of London, to Brixton, which, while in the early stage of gentrification in 2005, when this novel is set, was less than 10 years from the 1995 riots.

(and as an aside, I read this novel in the week Taylor Swift dropped her latest album, the song London Boy involving rather tortuous journeys from Shoreditch to Brixton and then back to Highgate, although the fact that her boyfriend meets there his school mates to talk about rugby, suggests public transport was likely not involved)

The Living Days is based around the relationship between two characters. Mary Grimes, in her late 1970s, has had but one relationship in her life, and that a one night stand, aged 15, with a young man Howard (she never did discover his last name) in the English countryside, the night before he was due to depart for service in WW2. He pledged to marry her when he returned but she never saw Howard again, and has spent much of the last 60 years wondering what happened to him.

Shortly after the war, her grandfather died leaving her a small house in Portobello Road, which she moved to and where she has lived ever since, making crafts to sell in the world famous street market of the area. But now in her late 70s, she lives alone, with little human contact, her hands crippled by arthritis, struggling to make ends meet, dreading the knock on the door from social services wanting to take her into care.

Then one day, she encounters a 13 year old boy, nicknamed Cub, from Brixton but visiting the area and she reaches out to him. At first wondering more what he can steal from her, the two form an increasingly intense relationship, one that transgresses boundaries of class, race and, above all, age.

Quelqu’un les regardait-il par la fenêtre ? Eux deux, là, qui dormaient enlacés comme un vieux couple. Franchissant avec l’aisance des inconscients ce que l’on croit être le gouffre impossible, le définitif mystère, le dernier interdit. Le dernier tabou des vivants car, pour les morts, il n’y en a pas.

Mais l’amour est cette chose qui ne retient rien, qui ne renie rien, qui n’élude aucune possibilité, se dit Mary. J’aimerais mon fils comme j’aimerais un homme comme j’aimerais un père. De mille façons et de la même façon.

Did someone watch them through the window? The two of them, there, sleeping intertwined like an old couple. Easily overcoming in their blissful ignorance the bridge generally considered impossible, the mysterious finality, the last of all taboos. The ultimate prohibition for the living because, for the dead, there were none.

This love was not visible to anyone, did not announce anything, did not elude any possibility, thought Mary. I’d love my son just the same way I’d love a man just the same way I’d love a father. A thousand ways and all of them the same.

Mary also rediscovers London, realising it had been transformed in many ways, from the metallic cold sheen of the City to more run-down areas (poverty too, has taken on other guises, and tried to hide itself behind mobile phones, massive television screens ... that conjured up a fog of illusions all too easily shattered), something from which, living on the traditional Portobello Road, she had been insulated (in this street; the past remained stubbornly alive), herself living, physically but more mentally in an England that no longer had any part to play in the present.

But haunted by memories of Howard, she also see London as a city of ghosts, TS Eliot's The Burial of the Dead one key and explicit reference:

Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
...
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"

And as the novel progresses what is real and what is dreamed or wished for becomes increasingly blurred.

A wonderful novel - lyrically intense and emotionally powerful. 4 stars and one I hope to see feature in the International Booker.

Addition: An interview with the author, where see makes an interesting point, relevant to the Noll book and even Ms Swift's song, on the geography of the novel:

https://pentransmissions.com/2020/02/...

Publishing the novel in French perhaps provided a kind of buffer zone, preventing, as someone said jokingly to me, a reader from complaining that you couldn’t run from King’s Cross to Portobello Road as Cub does. To a French reader, it would be a London seen through my eyes, without the temptation to go to Portobello Road and Brixton to see whether they were as described in the novel. It would be a London seen in translation, so to speak.

But then these issues have never really worried me: I have always made it clear that the places I describe in my novels, whether Port-Louis, Rodrigues, New Delhi or London, are as much fictional creations as the characters.

[bella · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something so spectacular about an eerie, complex, incredibly dark story written in such a beautiful way. it’s written like poetry. but it is utterly terrifying—not in the usual sense, in a realistic, heart wrenching, disturbing sense. wow.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s some good writing that’s come out recently under the broad umbrella of horror, and certainly I’d include this, a modern fairy tale perhaps, published towards the end of last year by the Feminist Press .
It demonstrates also that a novel can be realistic and fantastical at the same time. It concerns two damaged characters struggling through hard times in their lives who meet by chance on the Portobello Road. Mary is a 75 year old spinster living in poverty in a rotting flat, looking back at the many regrets from her life. Cub is a 13 year old boy of Jamaican descent who responds to the strange attraction between them.
Dealing with issues of sexual abuse, ageing, racism, and class conflict, this is a piece of bold, often shocking, and yet completely captivating writing from Devi.

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tender, fierce and profoundly humanistic. What a writer Ananda Devi is!

[Jenn Burk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent writing, but depressing, dark, disgusting content. Surprise magical realism pedophilia halfway through. Left with a hopeless, nauseous feeling.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 / 5 stars - the beginning chapters were a solid 5 stars for me, and it is a very clever, complex, provocative novel, however at times I think Devi's writing goes beyond pushing the boundaries and becomes gratuitous, hence it has dropped to 3.5 stars. Nevertheless, like Eve Out of Her Ruins, the Biblical metaphor and symbolism is incredibly cleverly handled and rewarding as always to comb through, and at moments the writing is incredibly beautiful. (At others it is repulsive.)
This is a very tricky and complex novel to review as it deals with some very difficult themes (paedophilia, for example), and can't really be done well here. However, I will link my longer/more discursive review when it comes out in the Oxford Review of Books as that will do better justice. (Get me, I know)

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Heavy-footed prose as a vehicle for a postcolonial fable in the Metropole with surprisingly flat protagonists and a ridiculous pile on of clichés, both in character and style. The last sixty pages are absurd. I did find pleasure in the first third. It's ambiguous and ghostly and, as the barrage of epigraphs informs you, envisions London as a post-Wasteland apocalypse through extended metaphor, making the whole novel read almost surreally, though the actual surrealism does not become evident until Devi's novel is in a state of collapse (maybe it's a tragically self-destructive formal joke about the fall (and ghastly omnipresence) of the British Empire? I can only give Devi so much credit).

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written complex story, set in London, translated from French. I found the English, clear and lyrical - well done the translator! The story line is convoluted, complex, and disturbing. But this book held me captive until the last page.

[Andie]

Quite possibly the best quality translation I’ve ever read in my life. I hope it won a prize. Couldn’t even tell it was a translation at first! The language was so vivid and descriptive in a way that translations almost never are. Would love to read more from everyone involved with this project.
The elderly main character made a representative of “old England” and Cub is representative of the “new England”. She is actually falling apart, her arthritis makes her literally frozen, hands clutching at nothing but still desperately grabbing anyway. The shocking degradation of a life unlived and unseized, and the horrors of being a young Black boy in England. Both characters locked in a state of arrested development, not free to be who they truly could have been in another world.

“My body would have been your house, my flesh, your nourishment. Dead rats? Howard, you could have eaten me alive, and I would have been overjoyed. I’ve counted for so little. Life’s passed us both by completely. Everything went too fast for us. It used to be the world wouldn’t have turned without us, and now it doesn’t matter whether or not we’re still here.”
“this house was an airplane that held them in this uneasy balance. They shouldn’t leave it: they immediately fall into the prisonlike horror that was the real world, with its prison bars of prohibitions and its explosives…. None of us has lived. Fear has imprisoned us all. And for what? We are passengers in a plane that might – or might not – crash. And between those two possibilities, there’s the vast range of life.”

[Donald J. Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unexpected, chilling, and captivating book about power dynamics, especially as they relate to age, class, race, and society. I had no knowledge of what the book was about from the start—it certainly took me on a journey. In a way, the chance encounter between impoverished adolescent Cub and the dementia-affected Mary leads to a whirlwind that is reminiscent of Nabokov’s Lolita, Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, or even Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Yet, it is something much more than a rehashing of literary tropes; rather, it has great depth and nuance.

It was a confusing read at times—I wasn’t sure where it was going, nor was I totally sure I had a good grasp on what had actually happened. The subject matter can be particularly tough, especially the sexual relationship between a teenager and a senior citizen, but I think it speaks to the “chew you up and spit you out” reality of modern society that Devi is referencing rather than a sick gimmick as some less astute readers might suggest. In my opinion, the ending wasn’t that great; perhaps I just didn’t understand it or how it tied into the author’s overarching theme. Nevertheless, it was a worthwhile read, one that’s likely to stick with me. I particularly liked her characterization of Portobello Road, making a setting so integral to the narrative that it takes on its own personality.

[Chris]

“Poverty, too, had taken on other guises, and tried to hide itself behind mobile phones, massive television screens, dazzling cars that conjured up a fog of illusions all too easily shattered. Nobody let their misery show through. But the creases around their eyes and mouths betrayed them, the fissures that opened up at the smallest failure. They clung by their fingertips to the edge of survival.”
Through the eyes of her characters, the most vulnerable in a metropolitan society, Ananda Devi writes a devastating expose of the anomie and desperation in modernity.
Devi’s prose (and Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation) is lyrical, poetic, a beautiful depiction of what is often brutal, shocking, or violent.
The quote above captured a reality I see in my work with tenants striving, surviving, failing to make a home. The Living Days offers contemplation on our lives—my life—as I grow older, less physically able, but still able, and able to imagine a time when reality may be less firmly apprehended and more given to fantastical beliefs.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part way through reading this I wondered, who is Ananda Devi and why don't we know more about her? She is from Mauritius (in Africa, but of Indian descent) and writes in French. This book takes place in London. Don't get sucked into the latest book controversy and instead read this!

This is a gritty, hard to read, challenging book. We are introduced to Mary, an aging white woman with some dementia, and to Cub, a black child who has already lived beyond his years. And we get their interior lives, corroded by time for Mary, and not fully formed for Cub. The way Devi presents this is stunning (and confusing). I'd actually just watched the Oscars Animated Shorts and thought how well this story could be animated itself.

The Living Days is a novel perfectly set in our time of inequality, but of course it could be a London of 30 years ago or 100 (it was originally published in 2013). Read more about Ananda Devi here, https://electricliterature.com/ananda...

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

‘Cub never realised that he could love this city, find it both unnerving and alluring. Nothing was as it had been before, everything had changed since meeting Mary on Portobello Road.’
.
This is an unsettling novel about a young black man who meets a white woman in her seventies, in her dilapidated house in London. Written by the Mauritian author Ananda Devi and translated into English, it explores the themes of ageism, racism and sexual abuse from a post-colonial perspective. I loved the descriptions of London, its ‘weight’ and its ‘texture’, its ‘blue or gray or black sky.’ However, I found the characterisation of Cub lacking, and the scenes of violence and grief felt mis-timed. Still an interesting account of inequality in London through the eyes of two characters with very different perspectives of the city - 2.5 stars.

[Hank]

Holy shit can Devi write a long sentence. Her elderly narrator's thoughts unravel with each successive clause, her consciousness disintegrating in a dementia haze. Mary finds a form of love at the end of her life with Cub, a young black British boy. (Yes, it's disturbing.) In one scene Devi flirts with the angry black man stereotype; however, this is an exception, as she renders Cub and his mother with laudable depth.

I didn't so much read The Living Days as hallucinate it. Thank you Feminist Press: https://www.feministpress.org/

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautifully written novel began with a sense of foreboding but I didn’t realize how dark it would get as reality became entwined with dementia and delirium. The final 60 or so pages became so intense that I found myself having to put it down after a few pages so I could get a break but I couldn’t stay away for long. The lives of a 75 yo white woman on Portobello Road and a 13 yo Black boy from Brixton came together in a way that transcended age, race, and class but poverty and dependence kept them in an unusual and disturbing relationship. This isn’t a novel I will forget.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this novel by a writer new to me rather hard going but glad I stuck with it. More fantasy than my usual realistic fiction choices. London/Britain shown from the perspective of an isolated elderly, white woman who finds the little she has shrinking. And a young black kid whose world has always been - in material ways - limited in hopes for the future. They meet and, in very unlikely ways, stick together.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chance encounter in London brings together an elderly white woman with dementia and a young Jamaican immigrant boy; the two find their lives intertwined in ways that neither one had imagined possible. Focusing on the plight of both people and the economic challenges and isolation faced by both, this is a heartbreaking look at the costs of ignoring entire segments of our society.

[Akssim · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has a good writing style.
But I could stand the pedophile relationship between the black teenager described as an full-grown adult and the white elder woman.
That bothers me a lot.
It is so wrong to write a story like this to display such "sick" behavior as normal supposedly due to her age, childhood and background...

[Roger Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A marvelous, twisted tale of modern life inside an old woman's mind, wracked with dementia and the pain of existence, alone and afraid of everything. The translation is poetic and haunting and deeply disturbing.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

so very strange but beautifully written!

[Lorri Steinbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so hard to read, emotionally. But it is worth reading. Looks at questions of aging, race, poverty and does not look away.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is on another level of writing. Gorgeous.

[Katie Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

thoroughly dark

[Maansi Pitamber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un livre qui vous retourne le coeur et transcende les différence d'âge.