NaNo Days 21 to 29: Winner!

I made it! It took a couple of long evenings writing, but I pulled it off!
Dire measurements were need, though, as the stats page indicated I would not make it if I kept up the pace I had on the 20th. So I set myself the goal of writing at least 2,000 words every day I could write, and writing at least 3,000 days on the weekends. This led to even more crazy roller coaster graphs:

If you count properly, I reached 50k in 20 days rather than 30. I can't remember ever having so few days to actually write on in November, but I didn't realise that it really was only 20 days until I finished this evening. Wow, that makes the result slightly more impressive...

One of the things that saved this NaNo was the World Cup. I like writing with something happening in the background, a sort of constant white noise, as long as it doesn't demand too much of my attention. Football for me is just the thing. I don't really care about the outcome, but it gives me a nice point to rest my eyes on whenever I need to think of where to move the story next.

Not that I had a lot of those moments with this NaNo story. I had planned out the main story points in advance, with all the characters I needed to make the whole come together. About two thirds through I feared I needed another character to flesh everything out enough, but I managed to get there in the end. Just, I might add; I finished at 50,018 words; perhaps the narrowest marging I have ever had over the 50k. But I was so done with writing at this point... Getting 1,667 words in every day is pretty doable, but putting in at least 2,000 whenever you write, with some days getting close to 5,000 words just to catch up again, is like doing small sprints during a marathon; exhausting.

But I made it! And I pretty much like my story! There were some inspired sentences in there, when I felt like was really in the writing flow. There were also some bits where I was just stringing words together, pretty sure I was already done with the topic, pretty sure nothing was gained from saying basically the same thing in yet another slightly different way, but as always with NaNoWriMo, it's not about the quality, it's about the quantity. 

And I got there in the end, even in just 20 days.

NaNo Days 10 to 20: The only way is up

I'm still writing! I just haven't been writing about the writing. But the NaNo'ing is still happening.

Somehow this November has work-wise turned out to be one of the busiest months in a while, which means that I can't find the time to write every day. This has led to more of the roller coaster behaviour on my daily written amount graph:

Yup, those are two days of not writing at all, followed by two days of pretty frantic writing to get back to par. There is also another write-in in there somewhere, where most of my writing group have already achieved 50k or are at least above 40k, whereas I was the one barely making it to the halfway point of 25k during that meeting. They applauded politely. We are group with team spirit.

But, today, for the first time this NaNo year, I managed to get my total word count above the par graph:

I'm at 34k words currently, the par is at a nice round 33,333 today. So not a very big margin. And I expect more work related things in the evenings for the coming week, so keeping up the high numbers might prove difficult still.

So it is hard to find the time to write. But when I do have that, the writing itself still flows easily. I have to struggle with the English vocab sometimes, and I think I am in dire need of adding another character before the story comes to an end, or I'll be left short before the finish line, but all in all the writing itself isn't the problem. If I'd had all the time of the world on my hands, I'd probably have reached the 50k by now.

So that's the good news. The outlook is optimistic, let's see how far I'll get in the final 10 days.

NaNo Days 1 to 9: rollercoaster time!

NaNoWriMo started nine days ago, which means I should be at 15k words if I were writing on par. As of yesterday, I am at a little over 10k. I haven't written today yet, so the number will be closer to the 15 at the end of today. But I thought doing the blog first and the NaNo after meant the blog would actually happen today.
So this year's NaNo has had a bit of a rollercoaster start. There were some days, including November 1st, when I didn't write at all. Then there were some days when I poured out 3k. My average word count per day is somewhere around 1,111 which is a nice number but not the greatest if par is set at 1,667. All of this is reflected in the nice daily word count graph NaNo provides me with:

Yup, pretty big ups and downs.

But when I write, it is easy. I like my story, I like my characters, I can rant on about customer service for 2k words without feeling like I should really be doing something better with my typing. So the NaNo vibe of just pouring out the words and see where they'll get you is happening. I just didn't have the time or space to make it happen every day of November so far.

Given what I've planned for the rest of November, I'm pretty sure this vibe will continue for the weeks to come. As long as there are a couple of really good days where I can put down 3 or 5k, I should be able to make it in the end.

NaNoWriMo 2022

November is creeping up on us slowly but surely, which means it is almost time for the National Novel Writing Month! Apparently last year I forgot (or ignored) all about it, but this year I fully intend to participate and win! I've been wrestling with a story inside my head for a while now, so I thought it might be the thing to try and get a move on for NaNo, but then a completely different thing popped into my head a couple of weeks ago. Since a new shiny idea is always better motivation in the world of NaNo than something you've been mulling over for months, I'll go with the second one. And I may even write it in English!

The only downside is that my laptop has become a bit old and short in battery life. Also, my license to Word was suspended a couple of months ago, so I don't actually have a text editor to write in. But these are all just technical bumps, the main thing is the inspiration, which seems to have hit.
As always, I'll detail my progress here, if and when there is any typing left in my hands! Wish me luck (if only in spirit)!

First Person Singular

I've read a couple of novels by Haruki Murakami, which were enjoyable but never fully understandable. Apart from novels, he's also written a couple of short story collections. Recently, I read his newest; First Person Singular.

Now I generally like short stories. If done well, they have all the fun of a novel, sharp characters, a coherent plot, a punchline ending, condensed in a one hour reading experience. Win-win. However, Murakami's novels are not known for these elements, they are more mystical and meandering and can resolve into absolutely nothing. So I was curious how this would work out.

There are eight stories in total, which are written from the first person singular perspective, as per the title. We never fully find out who these protagonists are, except for one story where he is clearly named 'Haruki Murakami'. Otherwise, we can deduce that the speaker is a middle aged Japanese man, mainly writing about his experiences in the past. These range from his first girlfriend in his teenage years, through his love for baseball and poems he wrote about the sport (poems which translate very poorly into English), to a mystical experience with a talking monkey in a hotel. This is the only story that felt properly 'Murakami-esque' when compared to his novels.

Although there is some structure, none of these stories have a coherent story arch, or theme, or goal. They are the musings of the past, in some cases probably the actual past, as there must be several autobiographical parts in these stories. The language is nice, but as I mentioned before, Japanese simply doesn't translate very well. I had the same issue with Kafka on the Shore, which has several layers of meaning in Japanese due to the characters used, but falls flat in translation.

So in the end, what we're left with is the ramblings of an older man, mainly concerning past relationships or his love for music or sports, without heads or tails. As I read through it, I wondered why this was worth publishing? Because Murakami is a big name, probably. Since he hasn't written any proper novels for a couple of years now, maybe his inspiration has run dry. And there are some philosophical elements in there. But if this was written by a random man of the same age and experience, no publisher would probably ever put this to print. 

The Glass Hotel

While in Portland I bought Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I read immediately and enjoyed immensely. At the same time I bought another of her novels, The Glass Hotel, which I saved for later. But with great new authors, later always comes sooner than I expect, so when the weather turned grey I turned towards her fifth novel.

Now Station Eleven is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, but The Glass Hotel stays closer to home. We meet a couple of characters, who all at some point find themselves in the same hotel (mostly made of glass) on Vancouver Island. Afterwards they go their separate ways, but their lives remain interconnected less obviously but tied in nicely towards the end of the story.

Now apparently Barack Obama included the novel in one of his recommended reading lists, so it must strike a chord with some people, but it sadly left me a bit underwhelmed. I liked most of the characters, but I couldn't really sympathise with them. Some of them disppeared for long stretches of the novel, which made it unclear who exactly were the main characters. Also, most of them don't get a happy ending, but I wasn't particularly interested in their fates. 

Apart from the characers, the language and writing style were good, but the themes and subjects just didn't really grip me. Two searching millenials, trying to achieve something but at the same time trying to hold each other back doesn't make for happy reading. The most enjoyable part was the collapse of the business of one of the other characters, which is probably not supposed to be the high point of the novel.

I read somewhere that St. John Mandel is working towards an inclusive universe, where all her novels are interconnected and characters can be found in several places, like David Mitchell does in his works. In this novel, the Georgian Flu that wipes out most of the population in Station Eleven is quickly quenced, and we meet a couple of characters from that novel in more detail. However, they didn't strike me as the most interesting characters then, and they weren't that special here. It is a nice touch, but it doesn't give you the surprise element that often happens in David Mitchell novels, where you meet the grandson or best friend of a character from an earlier novel, and a throwaway remark suddenly brings the two together. Here, it was more on the nose, which clashes with her otherwise pretty subtle style.

So all in all, it left me underwhelmed. It is always hard to follow-up on a very good novel, as the recent example of Sally Rooney also proved, so maybe my expectations were just too high. Luckily, St. John Mandel already has a new novel out. The only annoying thing is that I now have these two novels in a specific edition and want to buy all her other novels in the same edition. Which are nowhere to be found. I may have to travel back to the US, possibly even Portland, to locate the right versions...

There but for the

During the summer, my newspaper features writers and the books they love. Most of them included at least one Ali Smith novel on their list. The last one included There but for the, saying it was one of the best novels they'd ever read. I recently read There but for the as well, but I found it the worst Ali Smith novel I've read so far. Not that it was a bad book, it just wasn't as good as her other novels I've read.

There but for the centers around Miles, who while at a dinner party of people he doesn't know locks himself in their upstairs spare bedroom. We never really get to know Miles, as the story is told in four parts by four characters somewhat surrounding him. The four parts start with the words there, but, for and the, which gives you the titel. We could go into a bigger explanation of what that title could mean and how the various words are found in their various parts, but I feel that would be reading too much into it.

So the story contains Miles, but he isn't really a part of it. We never find out why he locks himself into the room. We never find out why he wants to contact one of his friends from a long lost past, who in turn visits the house and meets the other characters of the story. We never find out why he befriended one of the other characters, who was at the dinner party, or why he opens his locked door to character number four. This is what annoyed me the most; we have the central motivator for most of the action, but it never really becomes clear why.

The style is classic Ali Smith, almost stream-of-consciousness reading. I really enjoyed the first two parts, which center around the long-lost friend and the recent friend who brought Miles to the dinner party. I got sort of stuck on the third story, which centered around a very old women who appparently had nothing to do with the rest of the story until suddenly she did. This feels like a trick Ali Smith uses in more of her novels, but in this case I really didn't care for the character. The final part is seen through the eyes of a too-clever young girl who featured in all of the other stories, but it didn't really add too much to the first two parts. 

So all in all, I wouldn't call it her best, but it was an enjoyable read all the same.

Station Eleven

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in the largest independent bookstore in the world (in Portland, Oregon) and despite the weight limit on my already pretty full suitcase, I was determined not to leave without buying a book. I had a list of books that I maybe somewhat wanted, and as I walked past the shelves stuffed with books, I managed to locate all of them. This was surprising in itself, since a couple of weeks earlier a bookstore in London (England) managed to contain exactly zero of the books on the list.

So which to choose, with so much to choose from? 

I will not bore you with my entire thought process, but in the end I walked out with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (which actually took the longest to locate, as her name gives you so many options to place it). In the beginning of the pandemic, Station Eleven became a small hit because of its supposed prophetic qualities: we witness a global pandemic that quickly wipes out more than 99% of the world's human population. The novel describes the inevitable steps of food hoarding, the flickering out of the Internet, the beginnings of violence, until not much of civilisation is left

Luckily for us, covid proved to be less fatal than the fictional virus in the novel.

Also luckily for us, the pandemic brought to the limelight this beautifully crafted story, with its clever jumps in time, its well-crafted characters, its philosophical musings and its overarching plot that in the end combines all the threads of the story, all the lives of the characters, to Station Eleven. It is hard to write anything about the story without giving away major plot points. The character I loved best, Kirsten, finds herself some time after the pandemic travelling the world with the Travelling Symphony. They perform Shakespeare and musical pieces to the newly developing hamlets under the motto 'Survival is insufficient'. Just that image, of art being created in a world that is almost devoid of anything that we would call civilisation, is so beautiful. They are haunted by a Prophet and his gang, who proclaim to know the real truth about the pandemic and its cause, another chilling reflection of forces at work during the pandemic's worst times.

I loved every part of this novel, even when things turned very dark. It was one of those books which I wanted to finish to find out how everything connected, but didn't want to be over at the same time. Only the very best books bring this dual longing.

Luckily, I bought The Glass Hotel at the same time. And there are many more to read, including the just published Sea of Tranquility. 

I read somewhere that St. John Mandel is creating an interconnected universe in her novels, with similar characters appearing in different novels. I can't wait to find out how all of her novels are part of this greater world, and how many pieces we can puzzle together while reading.

Wake

After reading Expectation (and finding it much better than I'd expected), I went in search of other novels by Anna Hope. Opinions were pretty divided, but one of her earlier novels Wake seemed to get overall approval and I thought I'd enjoy the subject matter: women in the aftermath of World War I.

It starts with a threefold definition of the title:
Wake: 

1) Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep 

2) Ritual for the dead 

3) Consequence or aftermath

And to be honest, this must have been the most apt title I've seen in a long time, as this in essence is exactly what the novel is about. 

We follow three women: Ada, who lost her son to the War and is now estranged from her husband; Hettie, who lives at home with her brother who returned but is severly damaged; and Evelyn, whose lover was killed in France. Evelyn is the most embittered of the three; despite here posh background she chooses to work for the Pensions Exchange, helping disabled veterans in the best way she can without getting emotionally involved or connected. She finds little joy in life and seems intent on pushing away anyone who tries to get close. Ada is lost in her grief, imagining seeing her lost son on the street and trying to bring back a time that is now utterly lost. Hettie, on the other hand, can't wait for her life to start again, but cannot find the means to break free from the constraints the times put on her. 

The lives of these women are interconnected, although it takes a while for the connection to become clear. Plot-wise, the novel is very clever. The chapters on the women are interspersed with chapters in which the body of the Unknown Soldier is selected and moved to his final resting place in Westminster Abbey on the 11th of November 1920. This appears to be the culmination of the novel, the final day, but as always, life goes on after that. It is all very cleverly done, supported by beautifully poetic language in places.

However there was one thing that greatly annoyed me. The novel appears to be about the lives of these women after WWI, how the war affected them and how they are moving on, but the most impressive part of the novel, the story that has stayed with me in the days after finishing it, took place amongst men, in the fields of France. It is this event that has an effect on all three of the women, so it is obvious it must be included, but it somehow seems to take centre stage in the novel, pushing the stories of those the novel is supposed to be about to the sideline. The men in this scene find some sort of resolution by the end of the novel, whereas some of the women do not experience any 'growth'; they find themselves exactly where they started.

So even though it is beautifully written and well thought out, the way the experiences of the men do appear more important, more meaningful than those of the women, despite the whole goal of the novel being the opposite, annoyed me to no end. It is a missed opportunity in what is otherwise a great novel.

Story of your Life (and others)

A while ago I was talking about the film Arrival with a friend. I recalled how I was moved by the whole experience; the images, the music, the story (and plot twists), without actually really remembering the exact story arch. All I had were some images and a feeling of understanding. This was not helpful in any way when the friend started asking detailed plot questions like 'how did they create visuals for Heptapod B?' I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that he had been wondering about that ever since he read the story; how one would visualise Heptapod B.
This was when I found out that Arrival is actually based on a short story, 'Story of your Life', by Ted Chiang.

So the next I did was order the collection which contains this story, called Stories of your life and others, a title which I immediately loved due to its many possible meanings. It contains 8 short stories, some of which are really short-shorts, while other could be considered novellas in their own right.

'Story of your life' is by far my favourite; it is also a better story than it ever was movie. Or rather, the two are almost incomparable. I can't really explain without giving away too much of the plot, but in a story, you can move grammatically between the lines in ways that a film never could. A film can contain flashbacks, but they will always be linear to the main story (if we don't count really confusing films such as Memento). And a short story can explain background theory, in this case on how languages work, without it becoming boring or hard to follow. In a film you're stuck with narration, which breaks the suspension of disbelief and often doesn't really add something. Now I can see what they did with the film (which I rewatched after finishing the story), but I prefer the original written version.

Other stories I really enjoyed were 'Understand', where someone turns themselves into a super high-functioning human being, aware of everything and every interconnected event around them. It was tough going on a couple of instances, but a rewarding read when you actually got through it. 'Hell is the absence of God', about a world in which visitations by angels are a common occurrence, around which a whole industry of spotters and followers and support groups and motivational speakers has arisen. This is one of the stories in which the social commentary, which I think is an inherent part of a good SF story, shines through. The same goes for 'Liking what you see: a documentary', in which it is possible to turn off your ability to differentiate between pretty and ugly people. You attach no opinion to for example birth stains or burn marks, but 'see' all people as equal. A great premise to muse on; would you turn your judgement off? How would this effect our lives, our social interactions?

These were the highlight stories for me. There were a couple I didn't really like, especially 'Seventy-two letters', which is pretty long but doesn't really have a proper point (and was confusing in its time setting), and a couple which were nice reads but won't really stick with me for any time to come, like the three stories that are more of a social commentary.

It has been a while since I read SF, at least proper SF, but this was a really nice experience. Reading short stories is also always better than I remember it, so hopefully I'll discover some more proper collections in the months to come.

The Every

I started my reading year in the middle of the dystopian horror that is The Every by Dave Eggers. The Every is the sequel to The Circle, which I read almost 10 years ago, even though it feels just a couple of years ago. Time really flies...
Rereading what I wrote about The Circle, time does not seem to have flown in that universe. In the earlier novel we follow Mae Holland as she enters The Circle, a Google+Facebook media conglomerate. She quickly adopts to its philosophy and immerses herself in its workings. In The Every, The Circle has merged with Amazon into The Every, an even bigger, all-encompassing company that controls not just social media but also warehouses, stores, surveillance, transport and most other things people need to function. We do not know exactly how much time has elapsed between The Circle and The Every, but Mae Holland has become the leading figure at The Every, buying several smaller companies a week and incorporating them into The Every's business model.

In this new novel, we follow another young woman as she enters the company; Delaney Wells. Where Mae was naive and impressionable, Delaney enters The Every with the sole purpose of trying to destroy it from the inside out. We get a little bit of subplot as to why she thinks the Every is destroying people's lives (her parents lost their biological grocery store to an Every store and she was angry about the enforcement of cell phones in the national park where she worked as a park ranger). How she actually intends to do this is less clear; apparently she wants to launch as many intrusive apps as possible, so people will turn against The Every for intruding on their lives.

Other than that, we don't really get to know Delaney herself. Sometimes she too seems swept away with the need to control and record everything, at other times she struggles with the most basic privacy intrusions. She feels for one of her co-workers, Kiki, who is clearly suffering from all the goals she sets herself, but she doesn't do anything to interfere or help Kiki. Apart from these thoughts, we never see any personality traits, no more than we see the outlines of her plan.

With a flat character like this, the story hinges on the plot. Sadly, there isn't much of a plot to speak of either. The first half of the novel consists of all the crazy apps Delaney plants around the company, which are all quickly developed and launched without any resistance from users. In the second half her resolve seems to seep away as her plans all come to nothing, but some sort of plot kicks in as other people start to attack The Every in other ways. All in all, not much of a story.

But still, this novel is haunting. It gives an insight in how these corporations work, but also in how people work. And how this can lead to the horrors people willingly submit themselves to in The Every. The need for security, for knowing where others are and what they think of you, or knowing which goals you can achieve and how to go about reaching them, is universal and very recognisable. If then lawmakers and judges and others who can limit the exponential growth of a company that feeds upon this human insecurity are asleep, or somehow cancelled out (there are several examples of how The Every kills off any resistance in the novel), human nature will fall victim to such a dystopian scenario. That is wat makes this novel so scary; it could all very well become reality. I read somewhere that Dave Eggers was thinking up the crazy apps that Delaney proposes, but that he found out that many of the outrageous ideas he had already exist. Reality was scarier than fiction.

So as a novel, it is not the best. But as a warning, as a red flag against media monopolies and handing over basic human rights for fear of missing out on something, it is almost a must-read.

Books of 2021

Wow, where did this year go? It does not feel like it is supposed to be the last day of 2021 by at least a couple of months, but apparently, here we are.
Apart from going pretty fast, this was not a year to remember for its good qualities in many respects. But book-wise, it was a pretty good year for me. I read a whopping 32 books, which is even higher than my already pretty high score of last year. I discovered a couple of great new writers but also reread some old favourites. 

 So my full list is:

1 Daring Greatly

2 The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse

3 The Luminaries

4 Focus aan/uit

5 No Bones

6 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

7 Thinking in systems

8 Soul Tourists

9 Wish you were here

10 Life after life

11 Klara and the sun

12 The Three Musketeers

13 Utopia Avenue

14 Here we are

15 Weather

16 The Midnight Library

17 Summer

18 Beach Read

19 The Switch

20 Such a fun age

21 The Flatshare

22 Anxious People

23 Beautiful world, where are you?

24 Public Library and other stories

25 The man in the red coat

26 Normal People

27 Expectations

28 The Eyre Affair

29 Sweet Tooth

30 Mansfield Park

31 A Man called Ove

32 The Christmas Pig

So I (almost) started and finished the year with children's books. I read The Christmas Pig, J.K.Rowling's newest, during a feverish Christmas Day, so chances are I won't remember much about it in a couple of weeks. But it is a better note to end on than last year, when illness drove me to romantic drivel.

I had a couple of rereads when I wasn't really in the mood for trying new things, mostly during October (The Eyre Affair, Sweet Tooth and Mansfield Park). Rereads from earlier in the year were The Luminaries and Life after Life, two novels I loved but didn't really fully understand the first time I read them. Upoin rereading I liked them better than before; sometimes you have to go back after a couple of years and look at such stories with fresh eyes. Normal People was a reread after I was so very disappointed in Sally Rooney's newest novel.

Again, only 1 'classic' novel in The Three Musketeers. No Dutch novels at all. But a surprising amount of non-fiction, especially in the start of the year.

Best English novel

1 Wish you were here

2 Such a fun age

3 Utopia Avenue

So many great novels to choose from! I am really spoiled for choice here. But in a stark contrast to last year; my top 3 contains just 1 female author. I read a lot of books by female writers, but apparently they were not the greatest (and at least 3 of them were romantic summer reads). For example, I immensely enjoyed Ali Smith's Summer, but it was not enough to make the top 3. Maybe if I'd reread the rest of the quartet first, but now it just felt a bit too rushed and unconnected to make the grade.

So what did I love? Wish you were here took me four years to receive and read, but of all the novels I've read this year, it is the one that still sticks out in my mind the most. The whole atmosphere of the novel, with two people so at odds with each other and with the world for all the wrong reasons... I've just reread my original review from March, and apparently the novel really grew on me after that. The same is true for Such a fun age, which I apparently didn't even write about it when I first read it. But it paints such a pointed, accurate picture of current 'woke' times and the way people interact with others; careful to be correct while at the same time doing that mostly so others will think better of them. It is one of the few very American novels I read this year, but the whole American atmosphere only improves on the story it tells. Finally, I would never have thought that David Mitchell could write a novel that would not go to the top of my list that year, but Utopia Avenue apparently does the trick. I loved it, it is certainly in my top 3, but it is not his best novel. 

Best Dutch novel

Zero Dutch novels in the entire year, and just 1 non-fiction book in Dutch (which won't make any list, but it was a nice read on how to focus).

Best non-fiction

1 Thinking in systems

2 The man in the red coat

3 Daring greatly

So I read a lot of non-fiction this year, some of which was an overflow from last year, when a December illness drove me to reading soppy romantic stuff. Thinking in systems opened my eyes on how to see things in connection with each other. I rate highly on the 'system thinking' score in personality questionnaires, so this really spoke to me. The man in the red coat is by Julian Barnes, and at first I didn't realise it was a non-fiction book about an actual person, Dr Pozzi. But being Barnes, the language reads almost like a novel. That I read most of it during an Italian holiday probably also helped with setting the atmosphere of the belle epoque. Finally, Daring greatly is Brené Brown's famous book on how to overcome your inhibitions and dare greatly. I liked her writing style and was interested in reading more, but seeing her online personality as some sort of pep guru makes me wonder if this really is the thing for me.

Best short-story collection

1 Public library and other stories

I read only the one, by Ali Smith, but it was a beautiful read. She combines stories about libraries and books with eyewitness accounts of people's connection to a specific library, now that apparently they're being closed down all over the UK.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Klara and the sun

I think this is the only novel I could realistically put in this category, although it perhaps fits better in a new sort of 'dystopian' category (but maybe it feels that way because I'm currently reading The Every and everything connected to tech feels somewhat tainted). Apart from that, it is a beautiful, haunting novel. I must really read some more Ishiguru (as I actually said in my original review, back in April...). 

Best 'new' author

1 Frederik Backman

2 Anna Hope

Frederik Backman is a Swedish author whose novels I've read in English. Apparently they've been pretty popular for a while, with films and series made after them. I discovered him through his newest novel Anxious People, which led me to also try some of the older ones. I like his style and his insights, even though the Swedish setting does not always translate well through the English language. From Anna Hope I read her newest novel Expectations, which was so much better than Sally Rooney's new novel. I am really looking forward to reading Wake, also an older novel that sounds really good based on the description and reviews.

Most disappointing novel

1 Beautiful world, where are you?

2 Here we are

3 No bones

So the first one should be obvious from what I wrote about it before: somehow Sally Rooney's third novel is plagued by the 'second novel' effect, in my eyes at least. Here we are is not a bad novel in itself, but after reading the profound depth of Wish you were here, it fell a bit flat on its face. Graham Swift can be a bit hit and miss apparently. The same is true of No Bones; after reading Milkman my expectations for this novel were so high, that they could only be disappointed.

Authors I read more than once:

Ali Smith (2x)

Graham Swift (2x)

Sally Rooney (2x)

Frederik Backman (2x)

Expectations

So I am a big fan of Sally Rooney. Her novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People both made laugh and cry and love in equal measure, so when I read that her new novel, Beautiful world, where are you? was published, I gnashed my teeth knowing I had to wait until it would be released as a paperback, which for most British novels takes at least half a year. But the publisher probably had a sharp idea of their target audience, as it was immediately published as paperback, upon which I immediately bought it.
Now my expectations for this novel were high. They were not the highest they could have been, because in the weeks prior to the publication I'd read several interviews and/or reviews of the novel, all of which stressed that Beautiful world... would be very different from its predecessors on one crucial point; we would be looking outside in on the main characters, much like the script of a film or series. This was caused by Rooney actually writing/adapting the scripts for the TV series of those first two novels, which led to her discovering that she really liked this style, that it helped her develop the new novel. But despite this slight warning on what to expect style-wise, my expectations were still high.
Sadly, as I found out after just a couple of chapters, I do not like this style. Or rather; when such a remote viewpoint is combined with in-depth relationships between people, who are living lives in which not that many spectacular events happen, so for whom their inner lives and struggles and ambitions and thoughts are the main 'event' of the novel, I do not like it. And that is basically what Beautiful world... is about; Alice and Eileen, two long-time friends, who do not meet for most of the novel, but at the end hang out together for a while, and their lovers, Felix and Simon. The friends have grown apart somewhat, due to various reasons, and communicate with each other via email. Even these emails are remote, as if the main characters cannot actually take themselves or their friendship seriously.

Okay, so this is not entirely true; the novel is also 'about' mental health struggles, families, class differences, aesthetics, 'millennial angst' in general, etc etc. But this is all somehow hidden, because we only have their conversations, emails, and the way they act. We can see these people trying to connect and to form an intimate, lasting relationship, but we can only see this from a distance. We never know what they are thinking, or feeling, or why they behave the way they do. We can only guess. That is of course the point of it all, that you can never really know. And it is very cleverly done, I just didn't like it all the time.

So after finishing Beautiful world..., I went back to Normal People. I loved this novel so much when I first read it; how would it hold up?
Well. Interestingly enough, I liked it less the second time around. Probably because all those little things that annoyed me in Beautiful world..., for example how much she focusses on sex as a means of an exchange of power, was also already present in Normal People. And the remoteness found in the new novel is also present here, only less clearly so.

What really struck me, was how Sally Rooney herself is in each novel. She actually mentioned this in an interview, that she can only write about things she has experienced herself. So her characters grow with her; in her first novel they are early twenties, then late twenties, now early thirties. They all live in or near County Mayo or Dublin, study at uni, etc. But it goes further than that. Connell, in Normal People, reads English at Trinity in Dublin. At the end of the novel, he gets an offer to follow a prestigious writing program in NYC (which Mariann heartbreakingly tells him to take, still the moment at which I sobbed for these poor characters). Then in Beautiful people... Alice is also a writer who has written two very successful novels, lived in NYC to follow a writing programme, but after a mental breakdown has retreated to a small town to focus on her writing. All of these things happened in Sally Rooney's life, including the mental breakdown following the two novels. Of course, these works are not autobiographical, but still it bugged me somehow, like it took something away from the novel.

So my high expectations weren't really met.

The opposite was true for Expectation: a novel (yes really), the novel by Anna Hope which I read after my Rooney reread. This deals with some of the same themes; female friendship, millennials, finding happiness. Here we have three female characters; Cate, Hannah and Lissa, who've known each other since school but now find themselves in very different lives; Cate has moved to Canterbury when her son was born, while Lissa still tries to make it in the acting world. It took some getting into, but after a while the writing style grew on me and I actually started to like these characters. As with Rooney, not everything is said explicitly, some feelings or motivations only come to light through actions or speech. But these characters were so much easier to get to know, to understand and to sympathise with, it compensated for the poorer quality in writing and sometimes somewhat forced themes or conflict. The ending is horrible, it doesn't fit in with the rest of the novel, but overall it was a better experience than Beautiful world... Maybe because my expectations were lower. Maybe because I really don't like that remote writing style. Or maybe because an author cannot always write a novel you love.

Summer

Yes, the final instalment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet is finally out! Out in an edition that fits with the other three novels, I mean; the actual novel was published more than a year ago already.
So, after Autumn, Winter, and Spring, Summer is finally here. The first novels dealt (sideways) with Brexit, Trump and immigration, big themes of our times. I don't know what the original theme for the fourth novel was going to be, but with the corona pandemic and lockdown going on around us, this kind of became the theme. Or one of them. I read somewhere that Ali Smith always wanted to end the quartet with summer, to be sure she'd end on a high note, but with it becoming somewhat of a 'lockdown novel', I'm not sure this went exactly how she'd planned it. But then again, that is the story of 2020 in a nutshell.

Like the other novels, Summer consists of several interwoven stories. We meet Sacha, who tries to save the world from global warming, and her brother and mother who each have troubles of their own. Their father has moved next door with his new girlfriend, but is somehow still part of the family. They meet Art and Charlotte and go on a journey together before the lockdown takes hold.

The other main storyline concerns Daniel, an elderly man in a care home who alternates between this time and his memories of being interred on the Isle of Man during WWII. I really loved his storyline; his thoughts were one fluid motion between his memories and the present day, which made for interesting transitions. The two story lines meet at some point, but I won't spoil that for you. Apart from that, there are several references to the other storyline, sometimes in the simple form of a word such as 'letterbox'. Thinking that Ali Smith has written this book on such tremendous speed and was still able to intersperse these little references, to weave the web of this novel so finely, amazes me. She really is an amazing writer.

Now there are supposedly many, many links between the four novels of this quartet, as I mentioned in my very short review of Spring. Recurring characters, recurring references to art, recurring themes. For me, most of these went way over my head. When one of the characters walked past the fence of an immigration centre, I realised that I'd read about that same fence before. I knew there was something to do with a fence in Autumn, and people chaining themselves to a fence in Winter, and something to do with an immigration service in Spring. Was this all the same fence? Really? This realisation came about three quarters through the book. At that point, I belatedly realised that yes, all of these novels are interconnected, but at so many more levels than I'd thought. Somehow I'd missed that completely. But thinking about it, the name SA4A rang a bell somewhere, as did Art in Nature.

Then I went back to my review for Autumn, and lo and behold, Daniel is one of the main characters in that novel too. And Summer apparently explained several untold mysteries from that novel, mysteries I'd already completely forgotten about. Art and Charlotte are some of the protagonists of Winter, who apparently I'd also forgotten all about. That may be the trouble with these novels; the main themes stick, the examples and ideas that you need to think about for days after finishing one of these novels, but the characters and plot elements are gone pretty quickly. If I were to read all four novels back to back (which I will definitely do at some point in the future), I'd probably see a lot more of these neat little connections, these wires that not just connect the stories within the novels, but all the novels into one big story.

So what is Summer about? This is one of the hardest questions to answer with Ali Smith, she has so many themes and ideas and storylines that they all bundle together to create one whole. The blurb tells us; "People on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers." I think that applies not only to the characters in Summer, but to all the characters in Ali Smith's novels. "So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?"

The whole series is about divisions, groups of people being set against each other for no particularly good reason. For the final novel to function as a bringer-together of people is a hopeful note. This must be the high note she mentioned in that review.

Of the four novels, Autumn is still my favourite, although apparently I can't quite remember what it is about. Summer felt a bit too rushed in places, too much trying to be current, with sideway references to events that don't really fit in the main theme. But Ali Smith did an amazing job writing this quartet that feels so current and still so universal. I'm sure if you were to reread these novels in about 10 years, you would get a pretty accurate picture of what the main events of the time did to people's lives. But I would strongly suggest reading all four novels closer together than I did, so you can actually see the full magic at work.

The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is one of those rare books I bought purely on the blurb text. I was wandering through the bookshop, this must have been one of the first times back after the last lockdown, and noticed a dark blue book with a bright house on the front. And a cat. You can always trick me into picking up your book when you put a cat on the front. I knew the author from his Reasons for staying alive book, and I knew he wrote other things, but I hadn't heard of this particular book. The blurb told me it was about Nora, who "at the stroke of midnight on her last day on earth [...] finds herself transported to a library", where she can "undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived". Well, who doesn't want that? Who, in random moments, hasn't thought about choices and regrets and mused how their life may have turned out if they'd done things differently? And who doesn't want to know that happens when you actually get the chance? So this book was coming home with me.
(It was only later that I found out that this is a hugely popular book, finding it's way into top 10s and top 5s and 'must read this summer' lists. I just loved the premise on the blurb.)

So the book turns out to be closer to Haig's self-help novels than I first thought. Nora doesn't just 'live her last day on earth'; she commits suicide. Because her life has gone downhill; she has been fired, she doesn't have any loved ones around her and her cat has just died. Not seeing any way out of the mess she finds herself in, she decides to end things. Then she finds herself in the aforementioned library, surrounded by books that all contain a version of her life where she made different choices. But before she can delve into those, she has to face The Book of Regrets. For someone who feels so miserable they have chosen to end their life, the Book of Regrets felt like an unnecessarily cruel addition, but there you are.

Nora's first choice is to see what would have happened if she'd stayed with her ex boyfriend and opened a country pub, as was his big dream. Now the trick is that the books don't take you back to the moment you made the choice. They take you back to exactly the same day, exactly the same time. So in each story she is thirtyish and it is the stroke of midnight. Safe to say, the whole boyfriend thing didn't work out in this life either, after which she finds herself back in the library, ready to pick another version of her life.

Now Nora is a pretty special person. Apart from swimming at a very high level until she was a teenager, she also played in a band and wanted to be a geologist. In the library, she finds out that she could have been an Olympic medallist, or a world-famous singer in a relationship with an equally world-famous movie star, or a world famous geologist doing research in Spitsbergen, if she'd pursued any of those ambitions. And that is where the story came apart for me. There is no way that if Nora kept on swimming, she would automatically have become an Olympian. There must have been thousands of variants of the story in which she chooses to keep on swimming and still doesn't achieve much. It would have been so nice to find out she would have had a pretty average life in most cases (which, let's remind ourselves, is still better than the mess she finds herself in now), instead of the fame and glory that she immediately dives into.

Not that those lives turn out to be all that great, mind you. But still, the whole 'reaching the top of your field' angle didn't feel quite right. 

But that is one of the only two minor downsides to the novel. The structure of the novel is neat, with some really short chapters that just contain a single sentence or a single chant interspersed with the 'regular' longer chapters.  Nora is a pretty complicated character, who grows throughout the novel, realising life is more than the choices you make. 

We get to know a variety of people around Nora; her parents, her brother, her friends. We learn how her choices affect them and the choices they make. After living so many lives, Nora starts to see people close to her in a different light, from an elderly neighbour to the young kid she teaches piano. She realises she means something to them, that she influences the way their lives play out, and vice versa. She realises her choices matter, but that the people you live your life with matter more. Without spoiling the ending, which some reviews find too 'happy', I can safely say this book will make you look differently at any missed chances of regrets you may be beating yourself up about. And knowing everything Matt Haig himself has been through, I think he is well equipped to teach us something in that area.