My Other Spruce and Maple Self

by Susan Finlay

"“Early on you are assailed by an image so potently repellent, so graphically horrible that it squats in your brain and refuses to be dislodged.” Jonathan Meades“Susan Finlay has a staggeringly beautiful prose style that belies a devastating viciousness. And, what’s more, she knows how to tell a story.” Anouchka GroseDescription – “I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them. Whether they are good or bad is beside the point...”A nameless graphic designer is haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned. Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy's present ‘economic miracle’, he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms with ""arrows, signs, advertisements""; invents a new, purposefully incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes even more unbalanced. He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young, Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war. Known primarily as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of his birth, and with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael Bracewell, Equilibrium remains a relevant, powerful, and intensely visual account of a broken but (post-)modern man."

250 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 30, 2001

About the author

Susan Finlay is the author of three poetry pamphlets and five novels, which have been critically acclaimed in the Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, Art Review, Elle, and The Huffington Post among others.

Her short texts and poems have been included in group exhibitions and performances at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Whitechapel Gallery, and Camden Arts Centre in London, and published in magazines such as Worms, MAP, POETRY, and The Stinging Fly.

​Collaborative projects include the Coelacanth Press, with whom she co-edited four issues of their bi-annual journal; the radio series Documents; The Brexit Chronicles podcast; and the artists and writers' organ Jour Mal Jour Nal.

​​In 2016 she co-curated Inland Far, an exhibition inspired by Herbert Read's only novel and its relationship to Jung at the Herbert Read Gallery in Canterbury, and in 2018 Isadora, a combination of text, sound, and film pieces based around the concept of a European salon at MoHA, Austin.

Residencies include The Troy Town Art Pottery in London, Unlisted in Austin, the Freud Museum in London, and Callie's in Berlin.

She lives in the UK and Berlin.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before the pandemic, one year which people couldn’t stop talking about was 2016 and for obvious reasons, Brexit, Trump and enough celebrity deaths that it warranted a Sgt. Pepper style collage . Such is this post Bowie setting for Susan Finlay’s My Other Spruce and Maple Self.

The main protagonist, Allegra Le Clef , a cellist , has broken her wrist, is bombarded with emails and texts from her art historian husband, who is in Amsterdam and some strange spammer called The_Saracens_79 who asks probing questions. In the midst of all this confusion, Allegra decides to give a masterclass in Greece, which is going through political problems. To make matters worse she is constantly bleeding.

Allegra is fractured, Britain is fractured, Greece is fractured. Event structurally, the book has a fractured element, as it is broken up into short chapters (although the narrative itself moves smoothly)

My Other Spruce and Maple Self is a fantastic political allegory about a disintegrating Europe. What keeps this book from becoming a doomfest is Allegra’s acerbic wit. There is not one thing which escapes her scathing eye, and trust me, she has an opinion on it, most of the time it’s quite humorous. If not using her sharp wit she is forever trying to cleanse herself by swimming (even then there is one scene which brings out her irritation at society)

Allegra has a way of repeating past actions, thus her life moves in cycles, much like the musical pieces that are mentioned. Also themes reoccur, mainly death, which also mirrors the dying European countries Allegra lives and travels around in.

Clever, darkly funny, unsettling and twisty, My Other Spruce and Maple Self is a memorable read, made even so by the brilliant Allegra Le Clef, a character who will stay imprinted in your brain for a long time.

[Mae Milburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very readable but quite vicious at points. You get a sense of how cruel it is being moulded into a prodigy, how hollow success can be and how quickly the rug can be pulled from under u. I thought the 2nd section was the strongest, I love 'I'm going to fill all your holes' very much. I'm not sure what to make of the connection between self abuse, disordered eating and BDSM tho.

[Marianne Gallagher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pleasingly vicious and vinegar-sharp, full of ruthless little observations. The narrator is fully realised and refreshingly unlikeable - I found her brittle vanity very believable, but the characterisation of the other figures in her life less developed. That said, would love to read more from this author, because I loved the tone and the voice that sung out from it.

[Lillian Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Readers who enjoyed the author's previous novel Objektophilia will be pleased to find My Other Spruce and Maple Self similarly teeming with Finlay's inventive humor, surprising images, and snark. MOSAMS is largely a tale of abjection and shows us that Susan's flair for describing beauty can equally evoke the horrific and grotesque.

[James Harding · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evocative and brilliant book.