The Last White Man

Mohsin Hamid has another novel out. Or rather, novella. Somehow, I have ended up reading all of his works, after being the only one to pick The Reluctant Fundamentalist in my trauma theory class, simply because I'd already read all of the other post-9/11 novels on the list. That one stuck, and I've read all of his other works since then. Exit West, his previous book, was at the top of my Books of 2017 list because it contains such a unique point of view, memorable ideas and beautiful language.

So my expectations for The Last White Man were pretty high (while a part of me was also prepared for something else, with the recent experiences of great authors turning out horrible books) and I was not disappointed. The premise is quite spectacular, especially in these tense times concerning colour: slowly but steadily every 'pale' person (Hamid's term) turns into a dark person. This happens suddenly, overnight. It is not just a complete change of skin colour, but a change of race (although none are ever named); eye colour, facial features, hair, build, etc also change. In short; no one can recognise you anymore, not even your own mother.

Now in the wrong hands, this premise can spiral out of control pretty quickly. But in The Last White Man, we focus on four people; the main character Anders (which incidentally means 'different' in my native language, so that was a nice word play) who is one of the first to transform, his father, his friend Oona, and her mother. We only get Anders' and Oona's perspective, the parents are described in general terms, mostly concerning their opinions of their children. The other two parents have died, which ties in with the theme of loss running through the story. But because the focus point is so small, we get to experience their realisations, feelings, expectations, interactions, without also experiencing the impact on society as a whole. There are some small references; Anders and Oona have to stay home from work because of riots, and Anders is driven from his house by a white mob when he is just one of the few that have transformed, but the perspective never really gets broader than that. Their experience is the center.

It is only a very short story, so going into the plot would be spoiling things, but the language is beautiful. Some sentences run an entire page, meandering from one person's view to the next, or wind through the experience of an entire afternoon, no stopping, stream-of-consciousness style without ever feeling contrived or artificial. One example, just the one, from when Anders has already transformed but hardly anyone else has, and he goes to work and experiences the following:

"Anders told himself the stares were natural, he would have done the same, it was not a regular situation, after all, and to reassure people, and to reassure himself too, he tried to engage in his normal banter, to be, as it were, like himself, to act undeniably like himself, but this was more difficult than he had imagined, impossible really, for what was more unlike oneself, more awkward, than trying to be oneself, and it was throwing him off, this artificiality, but he had no idea what to replace it with, and so he began instead to mirror the others around him, to echo the way they spoke and walked and moved and the way they held their mouths, like they were performing something, and he was trying to perform it too, and what it was he did not know, but whatever it was it was not enough, or his performance of it was off, because his sense of being observed, of being on the outside, looked at by those who were in, of messing things up for himself, deeply frustrating, did not go away all day."  

I only wish for two things: that the novel would have been longer, and that Mr Hamid won't take another five years to write his next book.

Great Circle

I finally finished the other book on a female pilot I allude to in my overview of 2022's books: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. Apart from it being shortlisted for the Booker and appearing in loads of great reviews, I also felt drawn to the story after reading Beryl Markhams autobiography. As it should be, Great Circle references that book, and several other books written by female pilots, at some point. But without the implied reference to Beryl Markham's beautiful prose, this is a fantastic book in and of itself.
The book centers around two women: Marian Graves, a female pilot in the 1920s, 30, and all through WWII, who sets out to complete a circumnavigation of the earth via both poles, and Hadley (who surely must have a surname, but I have no idea), a famous Hollywood movie start who portrays Marian in a film made about this final flight sometime in our days. There are some simliarties between these two women, mostly in that they were both raised by their uncle and have some unfortunate experiences with men, but they are two very distinct characters. The Hadley parts are written in the first person, whereas the Marian parts, which also travel into other people's lives, such as her parents, brother, childhood friends, are told in the third person. The two stories meet repeatedly, intertwining until only you as the reader can see the full picture. For if there is anything to learn from this novel, it is that the truth is never as straightforward as it may seem from the present. Even if you peel back the sugar-coated Hollywood layer that is of course enforced when making a film, people still make lots of assumptions without even realising they do.

The language is beautiful. I read one part early on, where an ocean liner sinks, with open mouth, so completely immersed I forgot my surroundings completely. When Marian finds herself in the cold of Antarctica, it is as if you are in the tent beside her. We never really get to know her fully, because of the third-person perspective, but Maggie Shipstead clearly gave both their own distinct voice.

If I could find fault with the novel in any way, it would be that it might be a tad too long. Too over complete, maybe. At almost 700 pages, it took me quite a while to get through. There were some revelations, which did not really appear as revelations, until the final chapters did bring something new, surprising me into loving the story as a whole even more. It has been quite the experience, reading this story, and I very much look forward to reading her other novels.

Books of 2022

Despite all of my best intentions, 2022 was not the greatest reading year by a long stretch. I was hoping to finish a couple of books (one fiction and one non-fiction, coincidentally both about flying) before the end of the year to add some volume to the list, but the last week of December proved to be a short version of the entire year; wanting to read more, but not actually reading more.
So I ended with a total of 25 books, my lowest since 2017 (23 books). Some of them were really great, reminding me why I love to spend time reading, while others were pretty big disappointments. I somehow managed to avoid any of my favourite go-to auhors (Atwood, McEwan, Mitchell Swift) and read a lot of new authors, which may have come at a cost in quality. Since reading so few books I would have liked for all of them to be great, but in a year with lots of changes and big events (all on a personal level, so I will not get in to these here), picking the right book is somehow more difficult. Also, NaNoWriMo in November always halts my reading pace and drives me to reread old favourites, since writing something new and reading something new at the same time doesn't work well in my head. These are, of course, all excuses.

Let's get on with the full list:

1 The Every

2 Breakfast at Tiffany's

3 Harlem Shuffle

4 Are you experienced?

5 Story of your life and others

6 Wake

7 The Roadtrip

8 Eight Detectives

9 The Constant Rabbit

10 Beartown

11 Station Eleven

12 The Song of Achilles

13 Grimm Tales

14 There but for the

15 The Reading List

16 The Ladies Midnight Swimming Club

17 Mr Salary

18 The Flatshare

19 The Glass Hotel

20 First Person Singular

21 West with the Night

22 Small Things Like These

23 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

24 What If? 2

25 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

So three rereads, the two Harry Potters (NaNoWriMo time) and The Flatshare, since I had read Beth O'Leary's The Roadtrip earlier in the year and was in the mood for more of the same.

I read only one 'classical' novel, or rather short story collection, Breakfast at Tiffany's. You could count the Grimm's fairy tales as classical literature, but Philip Pullman has edited them to his own taste, so we will not. No books in Dutch at all, either fiction or non-fiction. Only two non-fiction books in total, come to that. But on the other hand, many more short story collections than the past couple of years.

Best English novel

1 Station Eleven

2 The Constant Rabbit

3 The Song of Achilles

If I had finished the novel I am still reading this might have been a harder choice, but as it stands, Station Eleven is hands down the best thing I read in 2022. Maybe even the best thing I read in 10 years. I wrote a gushing review about it when I had just finished it, so I will not repeat that here, but I do want to add that maybe I am now actually ready to watch the tv series that has been made about the novel. If only just to return to that universe afresh one more time.

The Constant Rabbit is the newest novel by Jasper Fforde, one of my favourite authors who should really hurry up and get that sequal to Shades of Grey (not Fifty Shades of Grey) underway. But in the meantime we got this bizarre novel in which due to some mishap a couple of rabbits have been changed into human-size, intelligent creatures. Everything is completely absurd, with a serious undertone concerning segragation, exclusion of others and the will to reach across a divide and connect. Coupled with big-company greed and the destruction of the natural environment, there are so many current themes packed into what on the surface just appears to be mad scifi, it deserves a second and third look before you make any conclusions. I loved it, which was a relief after the disaster of Early Riser in 2019.

Which brings us to number three. I would not have expected the Song of Achilles to be third in this list, reading so many other great novels; Harlem Shuffle, Wake, or Beartown by earlier year favourites Colson Whitehead, Anna Hope and Frederik Bachman, an Ali Smith novel (There but for the), new stories by new writers (The Reading List or The Ladies Midnight Swimming Club) or even the other Emily St. John Mandel book that I read, The Glass Hotel. But, most of these disappointed or annoyed in some way or another. Maybe it was the overall sense of this year not being a really good reading year, but I couldn't get myself to put any of those in third place. So the Booktok sensation Song of Achilles, which I got as a present from a friend who teaches secondary school and assured me all the teens are loving it, gets the trophy. I didn't do Latin or Greek in secondary school, so most of this story was new to me, apart from a badly remembered evening of watching Troy. I was surprised by how well the story was written, how the perspective of Patroclus changes your view on the events, and how much the characters come to life. It is, of course, very much a product of its time in the changes Madeline Miller made to her source material, but that doesn't warp the story beyond recognition. If I were in secondary school now, I would be happy to study the classical tales with books like these.

Best Dutch novel 

None of these. I have just joined the local library, so I might actually start to read these a bit more often, but in 2022, nope.

Best non-fiction (including autobiographical)

1 West with the night

2 What If? 2

I cannot actually believe I forgot to write about West with the Night when I read it, but it must have been the NaNoWriMo craze coming on. So let's set things right here. West with the Night is the 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, who has led at least four lives combined. She grew up in Kenya running wild on a farm with Masai, went on to train racehorses, then she became one of the first bush pilots, culminating in the first east to west non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic. Then she became a society lady. Now we cannot be sure everything she wrote about actually happened (apart from the records, of course), but the way she writes, the way the language flows from the page, is simply magical. It is a shame she didn't write more, but then her book wasn't really a raving success when it came out in the middle of WWII. Bizarrely, it took Ernest Hemingway to pull the book from oblivion. I am very glad he did, for it was a marvel to read, and has sparked some interest in other flying related novels and books which I am currently reading.

What If? 2 is obviously the sequel to What if? in which Randall Monroe from xkcd (which I visit almost religiously on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for new comics) answers scientific questions in a surprising way. Somewhat like the Ig Nobel prizes, it makes you laugh before it makes you think.

Best short-story collection

1 Story of your life and others

2 Breakfast at Tiffany's

3 Grimm Tales

It has been a while since I actually have some choices for this category, and I actually got to let one out as well (First Person Singular, which I discussed earlier). So Story of your life and others was a big surprise early in the year. The title story is the inspiration for the film Arrival, but differs so much from it that only the bare essentials remain the same. That actually made for a very nice reading experience. The other stories in the collection are a mixed bunch, as I wrote earlier, but the better ones have stuck with me for a while.

Breakfast at Tiffany's was happened upon me when I finished The Every while staying at a friend and had no other book to read. It was a fun read, the 'short novel and three other stories', although I can't actually remember anything about the latter. It made me think I should read more by Truman Capote, although I couldn't actually name any of his other works apart from In Cold Blood, which I read years ago. Grimm Tales are retellings of fairy tales by Philip Pullman, who added some clarification notes at the end of each one. I never really warmed to any of his other books, so I was a bit tentative about reading these. Most of them were nice, although it got a bit repetitive towards the end. But then again, these fairy tales are filled with almost interchangeable stock characters, so maybe that one isn't really Pullman's fault.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Station Eleven

2 The Constant Rabbit

3 Story of your life and others

See above for more on these books, but I'll say here it was nice to have such a mixed bunch of 'literary' works that are also intertwined with scifi elements. Maybe genre boundries are disappearing somewhat?

Best 'new' author

1 Emily St. John Mandel

2 Ted Chiang

This one can't really come as a surprise, reading everything above. Can't wait to get my hands on the proper edition of Sea of Tranquility and love that too. Ted Chiang doesn't seem to have any other collections out apart from the one I've already read but I'll see what I can do to find any of his other work.

Most disappointing novel(la)

1 Small Things like these

2 The Every

3 Mr Salary

I wrote a lot about Small Things like these and The Every earlier, which I won't repeat here. I just reread my disappointing novels from 2020 and I think The Every suffers from the same problem as The Testaments; the author just wanted to give their audience more of the same, to expand their world, when they should have just stuck to the one brilliant novel. Tacking new things on the sides doesn't help and in some cases even detracts from the original. Both novels do of course adress very relevant social issues, which I fully agree should be put into literature, but let it at least be good literature.

Maybe I shouldn't put the very short story that is Mr Salary in with this bunch, but it was yet another case of Sally Rooney disappointment. I read it in under an hour and forgot about the whole thing in less time than that. Really, why put these things out there? I hope to see better works from her in the coming time, but landing in the 'most disappointing' category two years running doesn't bode well...

Authors I read more than once:

- Beth O'Leary (2x)

- Emily St. John Mandel (2x)

- J. K. Rowling (2x)