Book Review: 'NW' by Zadie Smith

This week’s blog post is brought to you in association with the marvellous people of the Penguin UK Proof Group.

Set in North West London, (postcode NW, naturally) Smith's new novel explores the lives of four thirty-somethings emerging from the estate where they were born.

Given Zadie Smith’s writerly pedigree - for those not familiar with her, she is a critically acclaimed author and recipient of several awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award for 'On Beauty' in 2006 - it is not surprising to see that NW has been receiving a great deal of critical attention. And opinion seems strongly divided over whether Smith's experimentation with form in NW has produced a mess or a masterpiece.

I personally suspect that the novel's detractors have never experienced the environment the author brings so vividly to life, or have never struggled with their identities whilst trying to escape the social limitations of their upbringing. My initial reaction the NW's opening pages was one of recognition.

My second response to NW, after a Summer of light-weight holiday reading (and some of the not-so-light-weight ‘A Song of Ice and Fire books'), was that I had suddenly arrived back at university on my English Literature degree.

The abrupt, fractured prose style of the opening pages, representing a character, Leah's, stream of consciousness, brought me back to my undergraduate time spent reading Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It struck me how effective a formal tool this style of writing is for communicating the realities of life in a busy urban environment.

Smith's experimentation with form, however, is far from flawless, and NW lacks some of the impact of her earlier novels. This fact is not enough to eclipse the novel's strengths though, for instance the attention she pays to Felix, a character we are introduced to all too briefly, which gives us something truly worth reading for.

An ear for dialogue means that Smith, when she is on top form, creates deep, intriguing characters who communicate in a way that sounds real to the mind's ear. Felix is one such character.

Leah and Nathalie, a third character, with whom Leah shares the majority of the word count, read less fluidly, but, to me, come to represent life in London in our contemporary moment. Brief encounters with an endless sea of strangers, and the need to make connections and make sense of the constant stream of information modern technology bombards us with makes for a disjointed experience. NW, whether intentionally or not, seems to reflect this fractured mode of living.

The conclusion I came to about Smith's latest novel is that, though it is not her greatest work, it is very timely. I'd recommend you give it a try, bearing in mind that you may find the experience as jarring as a tube journey in the rush hour. Stick with it. The moments where NW shines are points of clarity, like pausing in the bustling crowd to take a deep breath.

NW is a flawed but very worthwhile read.

The Weekend and Food

It’s Thursday, so that means last weekend seems an age ago and the weekend to come is nowhere near close enough.

I look forward to weekends.

As a child the weekend was family time, time for dance lessons, and time for meeting friends.

Now, it’s the precious time I get to spend with my partner and catch up after the busy week.

It’s the time for food.

I bake for my other half and his friends (usually cookies), I bake banana bread for lunchtime snacks during the week.

 We make something large that can be portioned off for meal reheats, there’s a roast of some description for Sunday lunch, and there’s the Saturday evening meal; usually something a bit more extravagant. Of course, breakfasts also get a bit more involved (ahem, bacon).

The weekend is about having free time and all of the potential things you can fill that free time with. Being able to take time over making food is a luxury I constantly crave: it’s the absolute opposite of how things are during the working week.

... And of course, weekend baking means there are cookies to get us through Mondays.

Terrible creature of habit that I am, I love my little food rituals. Things can be kept simple and comforting in the weekend kitchen, and since we made the move to London I've found that calm, quiet time cooking has become more and more important.

Do you have any weekend food rituals?

All the best,

Alison

x

Book Review: The Underground Man

A short while ago Penguin very kindly sent me a copy of Ross MacDonald’s The Underground Man to review. I was excited by this because I spent last summer pursuing The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon - books which share The Underground Man’s genre - but had never read anything by MacDonald himself.

Hardboiled detective fiction is slick, exciting, at times grimy, and, for me at least, rapidly devoured and enjoyed. I looked forward to finding out how the exploits of MacDonald’s creation, Lew Archer, would compare with the likes of the notorious Philip Marlowe.

-------SPOILERS--------

The novel opens with private detective Lew Archer waking to a West Los Angeles morning. He rapidly finds himself entangled with a deeply troubled family - a desperate wife, a troubled husband, a son caught between them - and is drawn into a mystery of missing men and murder.

Archer appears fairly clean-cut, as far as hardboiled detectives go, but he still seems to attract trouble and generally rub people up the wrong way. The Underground Man has the hallmarks you’d expect of the genre - a beautiful woman in distress, heavy drinking, overly aggressive alpha-males, blackmail - which make it dark, but at the same time accessible to a wide audience.

A case in point, the husband of the dysfunctional family the narrative centres on, Stanley Broadhurst, first appears to have kidnapped his son, but he is found dead, murdered, soon after. From this event emerge several suspects, bound up in a scandal that has haunted the Broadhurst family since Stanley’s childhood.

The story becomes a little convoluted as Archer follows leads that become dead ends, but the pace of the novel doesn’t suffer for it. I found that I really wanted to follow MacDonald’s tale to its resolution because I cared enough about characters to desire to know whodunnit. On the strength of my enjoyment of The Underground Man I’m looking forward to getting hold of the other four MacDonald books Penguin have just re-released as essential reading for my summer holidays.

I would like to thank Penguin UK for sending me a copy of this book, because it reminded me exactly how much I love this genre. The Underground Man is perfect summer reading - compelling without being too heavy - and I would strongly recommend you grab yourself a copy before heading to the beach/rain-battered caravan this holiday season.

All the best,

Alison

The Jump Artist

Last week, Penguin Books UK very kindly sent me a copy of Austin Ratner’s The Jump Artist to review. Consequently I spent several (unusually) pleasant tube journeys and a sunny afternoon working my way through it.

---- SPOILERS AHEAD----

The Jump Artist is a fictional reworking of the life story of photographer Philippe Halsman, a photographer who’s work you might be familiar with even if you don’t know his name. It is Halsman’s later body of work that provides the strange name of the novel - it stems from his assertion that by photographing people when they jumped he was able to capture something more essential about them - an element of their soul.

Ratner justifies his project by describing it as ‘...an artistic tribute... more like a painting or a sculpture [than a biography].’ Rather than relating history, he takes Philippe Halsman and turns the photographer into a literary character. This move is potentially risky for a careless author, but in this instance I think such a strategy works because Ratner contextualises his creation with accurate historical fact, preventing the novel from becoming too fanciful.

Halsman becomes the medium through which we observe a portrait of Europe during the rise of fascism, the outbreak of the Second World War and the creeping ugliness of anti-Semitism. The way in which Ratner deals with this incredibly serious, and frequently explored, bit of history is subtle but fascinating. The psychologised Halsman doesn’t focus constantly on his identity as an individual of Jewish descent, instead he is introverted and centred on punishing himself for a lack of self control, and exploring his emotional state. He reacts rather than acts, and the novel reflects this, for instance, in the first part of the book concerning the trial, where the event is narrated by Halsman’s inner monologue, rather than manifesting as a dramatised version of a court appearance.

The attitudes of the people around him, and the rise of the Nazi Party, however, force Halsman to react in a physical way to his surroundings through an exodus first to Paris and then to the US. In the real world this final move provided the photographer with his big opportunity and made him into a great American success story, which Ratner downplays by maintaining Halsman’s quiet train of thought and constant haunting by a sense of misplaced guilt.

It seems ironic that [the character] Halsman reveals so little of his interior monologue as the trajectory of the novel leads to his photographic identity as ‘The Jump Artist’. Ratner’s creation seems to be very reluctant to be as open with people as he expects them to be with his camera. Susan Sontag in her hugely influential work On Photography suggests that photography can be understood as a process of people trying to verify and refine their real-world experiences. I think it would be possible to argue, in the light of her work, that Ratner’s Halsman seeks to establish his identity, his place in the world, through photography. The production of images implies the production of a series of fixed, unchanging points in time, in contrast to Halsman’s thought pattern, which is always in a state of drift. Photographs might appeal to the literary Halsman as a form of certainty or stability.

...

Conclusion:

The blending of the factual with Halsman’s fictionalised interiority creates a slow, dream-like pace for the novel. I found myself drawn into the character that Ratner has created, but I suspect the slow glide of the prose won’t be for everyone.

The Jump Artist is well worth a read (unless you thrive on fast-faced novels, in which case give it a miss), and is especially suitable for readers who enjoy work like W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

I would like to thank Penguin Books UK for sending it to me, because I don’t know if I would have picked it up of my own accord. Give the opportunity to read it, however, I enjoyed it a lot and would suggest you pre-order yourself a copy!

All the best,

Alison

Book Review: 'Let's Pretend This Never Happened'

    Last month I spent valuable Waterstone's points on Jenny Lawson's book Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir).

    As book choices go, this was an easy one as I adore Lawson's blog (http://thebloggess.com/) and find her humour really endearing. I also sympathise with her tendency to panic and behave oddly in social situations, so my reading here was always going to be from the perspective of a fan...

    And I'll be honest with you straight away, I loved this book, without question. I finished it and then read it though a second time. It made me laugh, but the serious bits hit home too. The impression I got is that I was reading a memoir by a profoundly honest person. Disregarding embellished stories along the lines of 'And Then I Got Stabbed in the Face by a Serial Killer', I mean 'honest' in the sense that she writes as herself, not as a façade constructed to impress people. She admits to the flaws and quirks that make her who she is (The Bloggess we have come to know and love) and relates chapters from her life in all the gory detail (occasionally literally gory as her father was a taxidermist).

    One thing that's really striking about The Bloggess is that within moments she can veer from the bizarre to the truly heartfelt. In her memoir she talks about the sense of visiting your home town after you've grown up and moved away, and how changes mean it doesn't seem to be your town any more, so you become homesick for a home that is no longer there, or perhaps never was. Her writing is a beautiful study in the nostalgia of growing up. Then she writes about a series of increasingly odd/threatening/partially fictional post-it notes to her husband. Later she introduces Beyonce, the giant metal chicken.

    Insanity aside, there are a lot of things in Let's Pretend This Never Happened that resonate with me. I'm prone towards anxiety-related symptoms, so when she talks about anxiety, depression, social awkwardness, issues with fitting in, and overreacting, I am right there with her.
    It's a hard thing to understand if you've never had a brush with mental illness - at some level you kind of assume that if the sufferer were a little bit stronger they might be able to put their symptoms behind them. That was my attitude until I had my first panic attack, seemingly out of nowhere. It feels like something else has taken over your body. So, when Lawson writes about the impact anxiety and depression have had on her as a person I have a lot of sympathy for her. At the same time I find her story empowering as I can see that she is a survivor, someone who will find humour in her situation, rather than someone who sees herself as victim.

  ------------------------------------------------

    The one thing I would say is that if you're very easily offended this probably isn't for you. However, if you have a sense of humour, I'd strongly recommend it.

    I'd also recommend it if you suffer from anxiety or depression, as it's the story of someone who copes with the spectra of problems that arise from ill-mental health, and has made a success of herself in the process. It is nice to be reminded, when depression or anxiety raise their ugly heads, that you are not alone in it, and that you can cope, and that there will be good days.


All the best,

Alison.

Cookies: Idiot-proof

These cookies have been one of my go-to recipes of the past few weeks. My boyfriend usually meets with friends on a Sunday night and I like to send him with treats: these have proved really popular. 'Famous Amos' brand cookies were something he used to get at school so I found this clone recipe, which turned out to be fantastic.

 It's also idiot-proof as it's taken all of the alterations I've thrown at it and still turned out great cookies - the picture above shows 1/6th of the flour replaced with cocoa and the hazelnuts replaced by Smarties.

Meanwhile, this is what our Jubilee weekend looked like:

Wet and miserable, but then you wouldn't expect anything less from Britain, really.

Alison.

Slow work, but she gets there eventually

Last August my friend Elinor got me the Fyberspates Scrumptious book for my birthday, along with the knitting needles and yarn to make one of the shawl patterns.

It took me from August to April to finish it, which for a simple pattern is frankly shocking. The thing is, it was so simple that I could only knit it in small doses -  my short attention span meant that I got bored too quickly!

The finished product is gorgeous though, and pattern+yarn+needles is an amazing gift for a knitter (Thanks Eli!).
Essentially, if you've known me for any length of time you'll now that I'm very easily distracted. But I will get around to things... eventually.

All the best,
Alison
x

Cookies of the Elder Gods, COOKIES OF THE DAMNED!!!

My boyfriend wanted some baked treats to take round to a geeky night in with some friends. This gave me an excuse to use my skull-and-crossbones cookie cutter and to cut some mini-Cthulhus by hand.

 This was a very happy baking session :)

All the best.

A.