I Am, I Am, I Am

I Am, I Am, I Am is something truly unique. An autobiographical account by acclaimed author Maggie O’Farrell, it is no linear account of a life. We don’t start with childhood or end with the present day; instead O’Farrell offers a glimpse at her frankly astonishing life through the lens of seventeen real-life near-death experiences. Yep, seventeen.

She writes with raw, unflinching honesty about childbirth, parenting and miscarriage – heart-rending everyday traumas – and will have your jaw dropping with some unbelievable brushes with death and devastation. Narrowly escaping a brutal murder? Realising decades later that you were one kind stranger’s clear-headedness away from being the victim of a celebrity paedophile? The latter isn’t even one of the seventeen events, just a startling aside in another story! I can barely imagine the excitement her publisher and agent must have felt when they first read this – I mean, honestly, what are the chances?!

Reading this book, it’s unbelievable that O’Farrell didn’t rise from obscurity on the basis of this life story but is in fact famous for her fictional tales. Certainly, she has had many rich seams of drama to mine for them. In the chapter about her childhood encephalitis (a life-threatening inflammation of the brain tissue that left O’Farrell unable to move and causes her a variety of issues to this day), she recalls hearing a nurse telling off a boy in the hospital corridor for making too much noise, saying “There’s a little girl dying in there,” a dreadful moment that she included in one of her novels. Imagine hearing such a thing as a little girl in that offhand, eavesdropped way and suddenly realising, from that, the severity of your situation! It doesn’t bear thinking about.

A quote on the back of my copy of this book, from Tracy Chevalier, says, “I have never read a book about death that has made me feel so alive,” and that just about sums it up for me. I have laughed out loud reading this book on trains and been reduced to unstoppable tears in cafes. I have had the worst day of my life retold to me in a way that was so beautiful and terrible and true that I felt understood in a way that was almost overwhelming. I am quite good with words but I’ll never be this good. Then I would delve into another chapter that took me somewhere I have never been and hope never to be and would be riveted, nailed to the spot. I have been late because I could not put this book down. I can’t remember when I last read something that made me feel so much. Maggie O’Farrell is truly an amazing writer, and hers has been a truly astonishing life.

Jack – the story of a middle-aged man waiting to come alive

I want to start this off by saying I love A.M. Homes. I don’t often read three books by the same author because there are always so many great new things out there, but I’d loved This Book Will Save Your Life and May We Be Forgiven, so when Mr Literary Kitty bought me Jack as a present to celebrate the birth of our first Literary Kitten, I was excited. Jack is not a bad book. But the magic that grabbed me with Homes’ previous two novels was sadly missing for me here.

Homes is brilliant at writing middle aged men – that sense of loss, of opportunities missed. She’s great with off-kilter characters who can’t work out how to successfully inhabit their own lives, until, perhaps, something changes across the course of her narrative. Her eponymous character Jack here is cut from the same cloth, but the problem, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that he’s a teenager. Jack is like no teenager I’ve ever met – he’s glacially calm, a wry observer of life around him but nothing’s personal to him. There’s this sort of disconnected emptiness at the heart of his portrayal that I assume is a deliberate part of his character but for me it just didn’t ring true.  

We meet Jack at a turning point in his life when he receives some shocking news about his father and the book is all about how he navigates this and the rest of teenage life over the next few years. It didn’t help that the book seems to be set in the recent past but I’m not exactly sure when, which means everyone’s views seem a little outdated and hard to connect with, but you’re not really sure where to place them or what to make of it.

In a lot of ways, Jack is a book about nothing, which is not something I generally object to – but it really felt like a book about nothing. I kept waiting for more and nothing came. I suppose I just wasn’t enjoying the journey – no, that’s not entirely true; this book is perfectly readable – I just wasn’t gripped by it, or by Jack. He never came alive for me – a teenage ghost, just waiting to grow old, to become battered, experienced, interesting. Perhaps Homes should have checked in on him thirty years later – perhaps by then his story might be a richer one.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine – and she refuses to simply scuttle in and then scuttle out

On one level, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is a story about loneliness. In fact, author Gail Honeyman created the character of Eleanor after reading a newspaper article about loneliness that featured an interview with a young professional woman living in a big city who described how she would leave work on Friday and often not speak to a person again until Monday morning. But although this is exactly how Eleanor lives, what drew me in to her story was that it was clear, from the very first page, that this woman was not a victim.

Eleanor, we know, is frumpy and friendless. She is also disliked and openly ridiculed by her colleagues at a mundane, monotonous job she has no interest in. She is alone in the world, unloved, awkward… and yet she has a certain surreal elegance, a delicious, unaffected quirkiness, that hooks you in straight away. She doesn’t care about getting along with her colleagues, who she considers to be incomprehensible morons. She doesn’t feel compelled to follow fashion or apply makeup even if only to fit in with her peers. She knows she is considered odd but she doesn’t care. She is a truly liberated woman in many ways.

When reading this book, I tried to think about whether I’d ever encountered a similar heroine before. Friendless, awkward, unbeautiful, lonely women are not unusual characters in literature but they are, as a rule, objects of pity – weak, mousey, embarrassed by their own existence. They scuttle in and scuttle out – bit-part players, never the main course. But here, not only do we see the world through Eleanor’s eyes, but her gaze can be haughty, incredulous, mean even… and very, very funny.

As her surprising friendship with Raymond, the slovenly IT man, begins to blossom, he buys her a SpongeBob SquarePants helium balloon, to her abject bewilderment. “Is it… is it cheese?” she asks, and when Raymond explains SpongeBob, she muses to herself: “A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth. On sale as if it were something completely unremarkable. For my entire life, people have said that I’m strange, but really, when I see things like this, I realize that I’m actually relatively normal.” When you look at it that way, you can rather see her point.

OK, so Eleanor is not entirely fine with the status quo, deep down. She has locked boxes in her mind that, at the beginning of this story, she is afraid to open. She is damaged, full of darkness and there is much about her life, both past and present, which is heart-achingly sad. Under her tough exterior, there is a certain child-like vulnerability to Eleanor, but still, she never, ever feels like a victim to me – always a survivor. A complicated woman, a fascinating one, spiky yet lovable, and innately dignified. Yes, Gail Honeyman writes brilliantly about loneliness, but as she herself says, “the novel came from the character”. You can’t write Eleanor without writing about loneliness – but she is so much more than that. I defy you to read this book and not fall for her wonderful originality.

Case Histories – cutting through the quotidien

I often say when I read a book I enjoy that I’ll check out more books by that author but I so rarely get round to it. Kate Atkinson, though, is a classic staple for me. I take her books down off the shelf knowing I will enjoy them, as I did Case Histories, even though it was quite grisly for my current tastes. Having recently had my son I find myself more sensitive than I used to be, as if someone had stripped me of my skin, especially when it comes to unpleasant things involving children.

This book is a window into a world of domestic trauma, focusing as it does on those once-in-a-lifetime catastrophes that shatter families and ensure life will never be the same again. As the name suggests, it is rather like a series of case histories, but loosely interlinked and told through a very human lens, through a variety of perspectives, while still keeping you turning the pages, wanting to know what happened to the book’s unfortunates.

I can’t tell you much about the content, I feel, without ruining it for the reader. Obviously, it’s not a pacey thriller, but Atkinson paints a masterful picture of humdrum lives suddenly overturned, and the experience is not the same if you can see the axe about to fall. If you’re a Kate Atkinson fan (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) this a solid read, if not my favourite of her books, just based on the subject matter. Her stories are always interesting, always full of life and humanity – Kate Atkinson really is a national treasure.

The Museum of Innocence: a memoir of obsessive love

I don’t often read extremely long books: War and Peace, Shantaram, A Suitable Boy; I can’t remember any others off the bat. I don’t remember ever having been disappointed by one – maybe because I tend to pick long books very carefully – it’s such a commitment. That said, I selected Orhan Pamuk’s 728-page beast, The Museum of Innocence, solely because I liked its cover. It follows the fortunes of Kemal, a rich heir engaged to a beautiful, captivating socialite, who throws his entire life away over a brief affair with a distant poor relation ten years his junior.

Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk is undoubtedly an excellent writer. He can set a mood, transport a reader to 1970s Istanbul so completely that you can hear the clink of rakı glasses and smell the warm air breezing over the Bosphorus, and he has great insight into the human condition. This is the sort of book that makes you want to highlight whole paragraphs of beautifully drawn, searingly true observation … and yet … in many ways, this was a hard book to love.

Kemal’s obsession with beautiful shopgirl Füsun endures for over a decade and the majority of the book is about him waiting for her, pining after her, making terrible decision after terrible decision until you want to scream at him. The story has its heat and its tragedy but primarily it is about atrophy, about a young man’s decision to let his life decay around him. You could say it is a book about love, but I wouldn’t. In fact, I think the narrative has an uneasy relationship with the concept of love.

Our heroine, Füsun, despite being at the centre of the novel, is a largely unknowable creature – a mere receptacle for the fears, hopes, dreams and obsession of our hero, in many ways. She is not necessarily diminished by this – from what she does say and from her own quiet, dignified and often horrendously stubborn resistance, we know Füsun is no feeble pushover. In many ways, she is always the one in the driver’s seat. But I am surely not the only reader to think that it is Füsun’s untold story that is the interesting one. What is she thinking at the important moments of the action? We rarely get to know. Instead we get Kemal’s thoughts – endlessly – the circular script of the lover obsessed. For me, Kemal was hard to empathise with – this man who had everything, threw it all away more through complacency and apathy than anything else, who then embarks on a lifelong journey of throwing good time after bad. Kemal worships Füsun, fetishizes her – but does he truly care to know her? I was never entirely convinced, and I’m not sure the author is either.

One thing I like about long books, and The Museum of Innocence is no exception, is that they mirror life. There are inevitably boring patches, beautiful patches and profound patches. This book is a wonderful memoir of 70s Istanbul – and in that way is full of life and colour and magic. And as a memoir of obsessive love, it is also powerful. It speaks to the madness, and the general fruitlessness of obsession, about what it does to a life or lives and how dreary and foolish it can become if left unchecked.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August – eerie, unique and genuinely amazing

I was lent The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by my husband. He is obsessed with the idea of time travel and this is one of his all-time favourite books. Sometimes you read a book and think, damn, I wish I had written that, and other times you read something and know that never in a million years could your mind have dreamed up the intricacies of its plot. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is one of those books.

Harry August is a kalachakra, which means that when he dies, he is reborn at the beginning of his life and relives it with the memory of his previous life (or lives – as this process repeats itself again and again). The first time it happens, he, like so many of his kind, is committed to a mental asylum as a child as he struggles to understand and cope with what is happening to him. Imagine dying at 80 after a lifetime of experience and then having to relive every day of babyhood, childhood etc. again. The tedium, the indignity, the terror of being alone in a world suddenly turned on its head. As far as you know, you are the only one of your kind in the world.

You know the future, inasmuch as you’ve paid attention to world events but you’re still bound by the (albeit adjustable) destiny of your genes. In each life, if he’s not killed first, Harry eventually dies from multiple myelomas. He can’t see any further into the future than his natural lifespan and can’t experience the past before his birth. In this way, Claire North makes time travel eerily imaginable, quotidian, even.

Things turn around for Harry when, some lives down the line, he discovers the existence of the Cronus Club, a society of kalachakra dedicated to supporting its members – and especially extricating them from the tedium of their early years. From then on, Harry’s life becomes more interesting – he can use his knowledge (assisted by the fact that he is a mnemonic with a flawless memory) to rise to the top of any field he chooses and become rich (as long as he takes care not to draw attention to himself – a key rule of the Cronus Club).

Imagine what we could all become if we had endless lifetimes to improve on our skills – if we could pursue endless interests, apply the experience of hundreds, thousands of years of trial and error. This is especially true for Harry because his memory is so impeccable (other kalachakra find their early lives tend to fade after many more have passed). But of course, the other side of this is that kalachakra can be haunted by their memories – by their own deeds, those of others, those things that happen in history that cannot simply be changed. On a personal level, it is possible to submit to a Forgetting, whereby your memory is erased and you begin again, with the unpleasant side effect that you no longer know what you are, so when you’re born into your second life, you will find yourself facing madness alone once again until you rediscover and contact the Cronus Club for support.

On a larger scale, the Cronus Club believes firmly that interfering in the course of history is a bad thing – its consequences can be far-reaching and highly unpredictable, and those megalomaniac kalachakra that have tried it have wrought considerable devastation. So when Harry receives a message from a small girl from the future to say that the end of the world is speeding up and someone is rapidly changing history, there are those in the Cronus Club who would do nothing. But Harry knows a little something about how this may have come about, and he commits the rest of his lives to saving the integrity of the future.

I could go on and on about all the elements of this book that make it a fascinating read, but I would not do as good a job at laying it all out as Claire North, so I simply recommend that you read this book if you are interested in time travel, the passage of time, the nature of humanity or just really excellent writing. Big questions abound in this book. Are we our memories? What would happen to our great loves if forever really meant forever? And what does it really mean to be human?

Eileen – savage suburban noir

I bought Otessa Moshfegh’s Eileen for a book club I never ended up attending, and I read the opening page with a feeling of relief. Moshfegh’s style is unpretentious and compelling, and hers is the kind of writing that doesn’t feel like work to read. Eileen grabbed me straight away as a character, a self-loathing, dowdy young woman who nevertheless has nothing of the victim about her. Despite being her mad alcoholic father’s drudge, there’s a ruthless core about her that’s evident from the very beginning. She is a fully fleshed out woman – self-doubt mixing with arrogance, a vulnerable desire to be loved and wanted mixing with callousness. Though she blends into the background at the juvenile prison she works at, she’s not a genuine wallflower, not ever. Invisibility is just a disguise she wears, just as she wears her dead mother’s ill-fitting clothes. And then the glamorous Rebecca comes into her life.

Though Rebecca is the catalyst for change in Eileen’s world, catapulting her into a new one altogether, it’s hard not to feel in a strange way like she is not the driving force in this story. Rather Eileen is, and Rebecca is what she uses to get there. And I liked that about this book. Rebecca is not what she seems, but more importantly Eileen is not what she seems. She is a plain, unremarkable, downtrodden young woman by all appearances and because of that she can move through the world unnoticed. She is a detached and brilliant observer with a rich inner life most would never think to guess at.

This wasn’t a perfect novel for me. After a strong start, the pressure dropped and I felt there was a bit of meandering in the middle, with the best of the action crammed into the end, when things became gripping again. The conclusion returned me to the magic of the beginning and made me think of it as a brilliant novel again. The Los Angeles Times describes the book as “savage suburban noir”, which I think fits it neatly. For me it was a flawed portrait of a strange young woman in a twisted world, narrated in a voice that felts hauntingly real.

The Bees – a unique and intricate universe

Every so often, a book comes along that is truly original, truly unique. Laline Paull’s The Bees is such a book. It tells the story of Flora 717, a sanitation worker bee, one of her hive’s lowest order. But unlike most of her humble kin, Flora can talk and produce Flow (baby-nursing fluid). She has cunning, bravery and sometimes foolish pride as well as size and strength. Despite her ugliness, and her clumsiness, her gifts and determination lead her to be granted access to areas of the hive that other floras are forbidden to enter. And so she opens a door for us onto the intensely fascinating world of hive life, where everything is done in service of the beloved queen, and Accept. Obey. Serve. is the motto on everyone’s lips.

We see what life is like in the beautiful hive nursery, the drones hall (where the greedy, arrogant males are preened and served), the fanning hall (where chalices of nectar are processed by the delicate flapping of the finer sister-bees’ wings), the honey treasury and even the morgue. In this rigid hierarchical world, Flora becomes the only bee of her kin to ever become a forager, leaving the sheltered world of the house bees for the wide, frightening world outside, where flowers can be tapped for their nectar and pollen and great adventures can be had, but where the terrifying Myriad (flies, wasps, spiders and so on) also lurk and lie in wait for the naïve or the unlucky. And then there is the rarefied world of the queen and her beautiful, haughty ladies in waiting, a world that would usually be completely off-limits to a lowly flora. But Flora 717 is no ordinary sanitation worker…

This book, with its unique and intricate universe, is masterfully woven together by Paull through meticulous research, tremendous imagination and a gift for dramatic storytelling. The level of detail here, from the design of the hive to the rich worlds of scent and often brutal social order that govern the bees lives, is stunning. In many ways, the harshness of hive life is an indictment of the way we humans oppress each other, spin lies to further our own agendas, crushing opposition and those who are ‘born to serve’.

Paull has spun a Harry Potter-esque world of magic for us, and at the same time teaches us all about the fascinating real-world lives of bees, bringing their complicated rituals and nuanced social order to life in a way that had me gripped, from the first page to the last. You will never read another book like this, and you will never look at a bee landing on the petals of a flower in your garden the same way again after reading it. The Bees is a genuine masterpiece.

Mindset – free your mind and the rest will follow

I ordered Dr Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset after reading an interesting article that mentioned it. It sounded like a fascinating study of the human mind and how our mindset affects every aspect of our lives. When it arrived, I was suspicious. It looked like any other self-help book promising to help you ‘fulfil your potential’ whether in ‘business, parenting, school or relationships’, and it did have some of the hallmarks of those kinds of books – lots of testimonials, repetition to the point where it sometimes felt like you were being beaten around the head with a simple idea that any idiot could immediately understand, and some real cringe moments, like when little Jimmy learns about the growth mindset and looks at Carol ‘with tears in his eyes’ and says ‘You mean I don’t have to be dumb?’

There are a lot of kids in this book that beggar belief, as they rub their hands together in glee when given a hard puzzle and say ‘I was hoping this would be informative!’ But scratch the all-American surface of this book and you’ll find some really interesting research on the difference between a fixed mindset (talent is what’s important; our abilities and intelligence are innate) and a growth mindset (effort and determination are what’s important; our brains and abilities are entirely flexible).

The book looks at the features and effects of the two different mindsets when it comes to raising kids, romantic relationships, education, sports and running companies, and it invites you to consider where the fixed mindset spots in your life are.

• Do you give up on something if you don’t take to learning it as quickly as you expected to, or as quickly as those around you?
• Do you believe that musical geniuses, amazing artists and top athletes have special, innate talents and were just born different to the rest of us?
• Are you impressed by people who can achieve things seemingly without effort?
• Are you more proud of the things that you can achieve without effort than things you’ve slaved over?
• Do you ever get waylaid by a little voice in your head that says you’re no good at this or that, that you’ll never be good at it and that you shouldn’t bother wasting your time on it?
• Do you ever feel the need to protect an image of yourself as someone who’s talented at something, even at the expense of learning more about it?
• Do you believe that some people are natural winners in life and others are natural losers?

If any of these things are even slightly true of you, give this book a read – I hope you’ll find it genuinely inspiring and insightful, as I did, with plenty of food for thought.

A Gentleman In Moscow – spend this Christmas in confinement with the Count…

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is put under house arrest in the grand Hotel Metropol, having been decreed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. His circumstances, already greatly reduced, are to change even more drastically when he is unceremoniously turfed out of his suite and into a poky room in the hotel belfry. But the Count is a man who has always been taught that he must master his circumstances, or else be mastered by them, so he sets about making a new kind of life for himself. And it turns out, that for a resourceful man like the Count, the four walls of the hotel are full of secrets, surprising allies and enemies, and decades of unexpected adventure.

This book is not a page-turner in the expected sense of the word, although it certainly has its delicious frissons of excitement. If I could sum it up in one word, it would be charming. The Count is a wonderful narrator – witty, insightful, wise, and it is a pleasure to spend the decades of his confinement with him.

Author Amor Towles has a wonderful sense of place and a natural talent for creating authentic characters. I imagine him to be a little like the Count himself, finely attuned to the human condition, seeking joy in our quirks and surprises and understanding our foibles, despite having no time for a miserly spirit or a jobsworth.

The Times says, on the cover of this book, that it is “a book to spark joy”, and I’d say that’s apt. It is also a book that takes joy in itself. It is intelligently written but never worthy or pompous, and it brings Communist Russia to life in a very human, everyday way. In equal parts amusing and moving, A Gentleman in Moscow is the perfect Christmassy read.