May Reads
The new Lacey, horse-racing and some insufferable writing.
May was a strange reading month. It started with Solenoid and Yonnondio, two books which conspired together to make me resent reading for the first half of May. After two weeks of struggling, I decided to take a step back from Solenoid.
Let it be known, I will finish this book. When I have those pockets of time and I really get into it, I love it! It’s funny and thought-provoking. But it is also over seven-hundred pages, incredibly dense and hard to read quickly - and you all know how I love to read quickly! All I need is a mindset change - to give myself the permission to not read Solenoid in two weeks flat and instead take my time with it.
Often I find that if I start the month with a ‘bad’ book vibe, it bleeds into every other book I read, and I felt that in May. My reading felt all over the place this month, and I am happy to see the back of it. There are a couple books here which saved the month from being a complete disaster - and that made me love them even more.
To see the translated reads from May on Martha’s Map, including authors from Brazil Guatemala and Italy, click here.
For those who are new, buy, borrow, bust is my recommendation key: Buy = I loved this book and highly recommend it. Borrow = I liked this book and think it is worth a read. Bust = I wouldn’t recommend this book from my reading experience.
‘Yonnondio: From The Thirties’ by Tillie Olsen
Yonnondio follows the story of the Holbrook Family in late 1920s America during the Great Depression. Maize, our protagonist and Jim and Anna’s eldest daughter, tells the story of a family desperate for a better life. Anna dreams of her children having an education and Jim dreams of moving away from the coal mines of Wyoming, and living out in the open on a farm. However, no matter how hard they try, moving from state to state, they can’t seem to outrun the suffocating grip of poverty. Unable to create any upward social mobility, we witness the Holbrook family fracture and sink deeper into the inescapable trap of poverty.
This was Closely Reading’s book club pick for April/May and I felt compelled to join because I was fascinated by the concept and that I had never come across the book before. In theory, Yonnondio is the type of book I love to read; an exploration of systemic suffering, social immobility and the working class. In reality, this is a book that would come to life under dedicated analysis - something that I was not willing to give it. While Haley’s analysis of the themes and contextualising the time-period were insightful, I struggled with the simple act of just reading this book.
Olsen’s prose are dense and erratic, which made sense in the Author’s Note that revealed Yonnondio consists of fragments of a lost novel. Initially written in the 1930s, Olsen thought she had lost the novel, and upon discovering it forty years later, she decided to publish it exactly how she found it. Despite the fact there were missing pages, Olsen wanted to publish the original and remain aligned with how she conceptualised the story as a young author. For Olsen, I can understand why she wanted this work untouched by a different version of herself forty-years later. But for the reader, I think we ultimately suffer in the name of her idealism.
The first half of the novel makes thematic sense, but the second half falls off a cliff. The narrative moves away from fostering a developing storyline and plunges into fragmented stream-of-consciousness prose that is challenging to feel moved by. While the poverty and suffering this family is subjected to is devastating, there is a lack of humanity within a majority of the text that makes even the most horrific imagery a burden to read. Instead of feeling moved by their suffering, I felt bored.
The imagery of poverty in this novel is unlike anything I have ever read. Yonnondio explores a harshness of poverty that is almost unrecognisable to how it presents today. Despite all my criticisms of this novel, I thought the depiction of specifically Anna’s suffering was harrowing. After not feeling moved by any of the novel, the descriptions of a poor mothers exhaustion soberingly arrested my attention. Yonnondio explores a gendered dynamic of poverty that was probably unheard of in its time. In the throes of postpartum psychosis and exhaustion, Anna is subjected to extensive abuse by her husband and care demands from her children. I can’t recall ever encountering such a heartbreaking account of motherhood exhaustion, with no support or compassion from their partner or wider society. For that alone, I can appreciate the merit of Olsen exploring the inner life of poor working mothers.
Yonnondio would have been a great book to study at college, but I am not at college anymore. Put me back in that academic environment and I am sure I could write extensively about the imagery of this novel. But I read for pleasure now and this was not enjoyable, so I would not recommend it and call it a bust. If anyone ever needs a fictitious depiction of maternal suffering and the unimaginable gendered hardship of being a mother in extreme poverty, look no further than this book.
‘Kick The Latch’ by Kathryn Scanlan
Based on real interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, Kick The Latch vividly traces a woman’s life at the racetrack through episodic vignettes, highlighting her experience in a male-dominated world rife with abuse and misogyny. Sonia found a love for horses early on and sacrificed all the comforts of a modern life to be close to the track. She forfeits sleep, financial stability, family and romantic relationships in order to intimately understand horses and their needs. Poverty and violence meet the passion and love for horses to create insight into the hostile world of professional racing.
Kick The Latch is characterised by a sacrifice so few of us could relate too, exchanging any semblance of stability in their lives for a relationship with the horses. It showcases the profound commitment, generosity, and selfishness that has to exist for a horse to be so well cared for. The tender exploration of the significance of our relationships with animals was very moving. While so many characters and environments in this novel were volatile and cruel, the horses are a calm and steady presence;
‘When I was a kid I had birthday parties for Rowdy, and after I left my Mom had them for me. She’d take pictures of him and mail them to me at the track. He’d have a birthday hat on [...]
My Mom would be having a bad day, a stressful week, but once she was with Rowdy, she felt better. Rowdy and I have lots of secrets she’d say’ 1
A complex web of inequality characterises Sonia’s experience on the track. The matter of fact nature that Kick the Latch presents the misogyny suggests that it is just part of being in this world, a price Sonia has to pay for loving horses. Scanlan portrays how socioeconomic status dictates the sport and is even amplified on the track, creating a chasm between groomers and jockeys. Scanlan's prose is fierce, taught and full of nuance as she takes us into an unfamiliar world.
Kick The Latch is profound throughout, but perhaps my favourite exploration was that of mortality. Scanlan frankly presents the proximity they have to death, disability and sickness because of the job. She presents a world of blurred lines, one where life and death, addiction and recreation are so slight they are almost invisible. The relationship with substances on and off the track, the fine line between medicine and abuse, portrays a moral ambiguity that Kick the Latch exemplifies. Scanlan imparts no judgement on Sonia’s story, making her an almost invisible participant in the novel. The intimacy Scanlan creates between Sonia and the reader is so remarkable, her ability to erase herself as the storyteller is astonishing. For the first few pages of this novel I genuinely thought Scanlan was recounting from her own lived experience.
Scanlan presents horse racing as an intimidatingly insular community, but once you’re in, you’re enveloped into this functioning madness which is addictive. In essence this is how reading the book feels. Scanlan has crafted a fun and fascinating novel which, I might go as far as to say, was perfectly done. I love the ambiguity Kick The Latch walks between fiction and nonfiction, creating fleeting glimpses into the world of horse-racing that are both personal and informative. I would absolutely recommend this and call it a buy! I am so fascinated by Scanlan as a writer now - has anyone else read any of her other work?
‘The Love Of Singular Men’ by Victor Heringer
On one hot summer in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, Camilo’s Dad brings home a boy called Cosme. While initially apprehensive, Camilo and Cosme develop a friendship that evolves into something much more tender. But an act of violence shatters their world and changes the trajectory of Camilo’s life forever. In a disorientingly beautiful dual narrative, The Love Of Singular Men fluidly explores Camilo as both a young boy and an old man shaped by the violence of Brazilian society.
The Love of Singular Men is a coming-of-age story of a young boy falling in love, and experiencing loss and heartbreak, during the political upheaval of Brazil from the mid 1960s-1980s. The narrative in The Love Of Singular Men is unlike anything I have read before, it melts together tenses and time frames without much of a marker of change - and shockingly, it mostly works. Heringer’s narrative envelopes you into a trance as we move between past and present of Camilo’s life. It’s arresting and evocative as Camilo recalls his childhood, his early experiences of being disabled at such a young age; ‘anyone who thinks the cripple knows nothing about the furies of the body is dead wrong’ and falling in love. What drives this novel is its exploration of humanity, specifically of the intoxicating experience of first love. Heringer’s prose provides a profound commentary on how a first love can characterise our existence.
The ingenuity of Heringer’s prose, which is so hard to communicate, is perhaps best illustrated by the key Camilo makes to categorise his old classmates. Camilo argues that his old class is a snapshot of the entirety of humanity, that ‘the eternity of the species could be summed up in [these] forty children’ - that he doesn’t need to keep in contact with them because he sees them everywhere he goes. This key is filled with nostalgia and humour, creating a reference point for the rest of the book that is intimate and expansive, describing characters going forward in a unique way.
The past is consuming Camilo, something which co-exists on the page with the violence in Brazil under the dictatorship. Together it creates this atmosphere of unavoidable violence and tragedy, and perhaps the inevitability of Cosme’s fate. With the chapters counting up to sixty-six, the longest chapter is a climax of tension between Camilo and Renato - a boy who is linked to the tragedy. After this, the narrative pivots and starts counting down, abruptly ending at thirty-five, implying that the story is unfinished. This ending is poetically fitting; both the novel, and Heringer’s life are cut short. The Love of Singular Men was translated posthumously, after Heringer died of suicide. Going into the novel knowing this information is evocative because Heringer seems to share some emotional complexity with the characters on the page; it makes the novel more vivid in both its offerings of love and loss.
The Love of Singular Men is a singular novel, filled with so much emotion that is incredibly hard to pin down or explain in any concise manner. While occasionally Heringer’s ingenuity in not identifying changes in the narrative becomes confusing, the emotional essence of what he was trying to achieve is never lost on the reader. Though the form of the novel is playful, the emotion is not as it meditates on complicity and regret. I’d recommend this and call it a borrow!
‘Evenings and Weekends’ by Oisín McKenna
It’s June 2019 in London and the hottest summer on record. A whale has beached itself in the Thames and an interconnected group of thirty-somethings are about to embark on a weekend that reveals the precarity of life itself.
Maggie is 30, broke and pregnant with her high-school boyfriend but she is uncertain as to whether he is ‘the one’. Ed, the boyfriend, has just nearly slept with a man in a train station toilet and harbours his own uncertainty about his relationship with Maggie - but believes a baby will fix everything. Phil, Maggie’s best friend, hates his job, lives in a warehouse and is in love with his housemate, Keith, who has a boyfriend. Phil’s mother, who lives opposite Ed’s mother in Basildon, has just been diagnosed with cancer and has told one of her sons, Callum, but not Phil. Callum, who is Ed’s best friend, is getting married soon and is having his stag, while his fiancee Holly, has her hen this weekend - which Maggie is going too.
Evenings and Weekends is set up to have an almost Shakespearean level of tragedy, with every character hiding something from someone in a complex web of relationships. The emotional stakes for almost every single character are extremely high. McKenna has crafted an exceptionally strong opening for a novel, one where you are immediately invested in the trajectory of their stories. Over the course of one weekend, each character has the potential for their life to come completely crashing down because of a revelation. McKenna presents a story with immense pull and promise, of great emotional complexity. Unfortunately, this is all the novel amounts to.
Last year Evenings and Weekends was described as the book of the summer, with McKenna’s writing ‘just like Rooneys’. I love Rooney and I do feel compelled every now and then to read a book which has the literary world in a chokehold. While the expert pacing of eight characters' perspectives alongside each other, without ever sacrificing one narrative to propel the other, is something to be celebrated - the story is lacklustre.
Evenings and Weekends relies on these building blocks of poor communication and misunderstanding to propel the narrative. While initially this is appealing, it becomes increasingly tiresome that the central thrust of the story relies on an emotionally unintelligent group of people who are horrific at communicating. The secrets that exist within this novel; a cancer diagnosis, an unplanned pregnancy, repressed sexuality and severe mental health issues, are consequential secrets that within a group this closely connected, are complex and significant. Yet, McKenna masterfully manages to make every single issue inconsequential. The emotional fall out of any of these secrets is huge, and yet, there is none.
The reliance on poor communication to propel a novel becomes unbelievably frustrating and boring. This, coupled with no character development, creates an atmosphere of indifference for the reader. The weekend is positioned by McKenna to have the potential to be life changing. However, when these painstakingly drawn out secrets are revealed, there is no emotional consequence. The absence of emotional turbulence was unbelievably ridiculous. Every issue is resolved, and willingly accepted too easily and the emotional landscape of their lives continue unscathed.
Evenings and Weekends hinge’s on the potential of conflict, and yet there is none. There is a shocking lack of conflict, no reaction to any of the deceit. While a story does not have to be full of conflict to be compelling, the lack of emotive response from every character was wildly unbelievable. If the revelation of these secrets are inconsequential to the characters, they ultimately become inconsequential to us; rendering the narrative meaningless.
The tragedy in this novel is not the revealed secrets, but instead McKenna’s impassive prose and predictable narrative. I could not believe a novel with this much secrecy and lies embedded within it was so boring to read. It was predictable and saccharine. A narrative that promised turbulence finished almost identically to where it started. While there are parts that were good, I honestly wouldn’t recommend it. After finishing Evenings and Weekends I truly felt cheated of the time I put into such a flaccid story. This is a bust. If you enjoy stories where everything falls into place, finding escapism through worlds with no emotional consequence, I would recommend this to you. Each to their own, truly, but I seek a lot more grit in my stories and this was the smoothest story I have read in a long time. McKenna writes nothing like Sally Rooney so I would advise none of you to fall for the same lie that I did.
‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ by Ben Lerner
Adam Gordon is a young, American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. He is aimless and divided about who he is, and who he wants to be. Despite being in Madrid because he received a prestigious fellowship, Adam believes he, and his poetry, are fraudulent. Adam does what any aimless westerner finding themselves in a foreign country does best, and fuels his anxiety with coffee, cannabis and self-prescribed antidepressants. We follow Adam adrift and self-conscious as he grapples with his belief that he is an imposter among the literary community in Madrid.
This book is as self-indulgent as it sounds. Adam’s characterisation is frankly hilarious and ultimately the only strength of this novel. Despite being able to speak Spanish, he consistently resists the fact he is multilingual and relies on the social crutch of not being fluent. He observers others and tries to embody them to help his bruised ego. He lies profusely to try and enhance his vapid character, making up tragic stories to gain a level of social cache; he fabricates that his mum is dead and his dad is an abusive fascist, despite having alive, loving parents in America. Adam is outrageous in his self-absorption and his characterisation, while infuriating, is enjoyable in its absurdity.
However, beyond this, Leaving the Atocha Station is remarkably without point. There is little thrust in the novel, and the narrative circles Adam’s stagnant insecurity about himself. I came away from reading this novel with almost no thoughts, which is undoubtedly the most profoundly tragic reaction a reader can have to. Unlike Evenings and Weekends which made me feel something, albeit annoyance, Leaving the Atocha Station evoked nothing.
While Adam’s characterisation is entertaining on the surface, Lerner gives him no development or depth. Instead investing in Adams character development, the prose meanders about literature and poetry but not in any remarkable way that is profound or contributes to the trajectory of the story. Perhaps Lerner really did intend to explore the arrogant and self-indulgent behaviour exercised by Americans running away to Europe, believing they can reinvent themselves with no repercussions.
There were glimpses of poignancy I loved about the art of translation, discussing the emotions and essence language which are untranslatable. At one point, Adam shares his anxieties about his a fraud with his translator;
‘I’m worried you’re too cool for me, that you’ll realise I’m in fact a fraud. An inelegant fraud. I won’t be able to fool you and you’ll get bored’ 2
To which she replies;
‘All you’re describing is the personality of a translator.’ 3
Which I thought was brilliant. These sarcastic snippets about the politics of translation were enjoyable for someone who reads so many translated books. Alas, this poignancy about one of my favourite forms of literature was fleeting, and Lerner sunk us back into Adam’s mind numbingly boring hedonism. I read this alongside
and we shared an extreme apathy towards it. The ruminating pointlessness of this novel made me think of The Savage Detectives - there is a shared pseudo mediation on ‘poetry’ which never says anything of substance.Leaving the Atocha Station is a bland and plotless attempt at exploring the performance of language and communication. I would, unsurprisingly, not recommend this at all and call it a bust!
‘The Möbius Book’ by Catherine Lacey
Lacey, famously an author of speculative fiction, has published her first ‘genre-less’ book. While marketing departments are currently scrambling for how to categorise Möbius, unsure whether to push it as fiction or nonfiction, Lacey simply categorises it as ‘an object of rage’.
The Möbius Book is about betrayal. The rage that Lacey credits bringing it into existence is the product of Lacey’s (now ex) partner ending their five-year relationship over a polite and diplomatically worded email. Throughout, Lacey calls her ex ‘The Reason’ - a petty and veiled attempt to remind the reader of how, and why, Möbius came to be. The Reason wanted to leave their relationship to pursue another, and asked Lacey to sleep in the guest bedroom until they go their separate ways and sell the house. The aftermath of this abrupt and world-shattering news is The Möbius Book; an account of a woman trying to understand how this happened and how she didn’t see it coming. However, The Reason is only one half of this book. Turn it around, and there is a new beginning (or new ending), a flash fiction about two friends discussing the breakdowns of their romantic relationships. Across this experimental form exists parallels of coercion, uncertainty and betrayal in unhealthy romantic relationships.
‘There is nothing wrong with inventing a story to explain something real to yourself’ - This was the side I started on, turning the book around several times unable to detect a ‘true’ beginning. Despite being aware of the magic and insanity of this never ending book, ultimately I thought I could detect an obvious place to begin - I could not.
‘We were looking for endings, but all we could find was more middle - it was hard, we agreed, to find satisfying conclusions to stories that weren’t exactly stories but rather a set of prompts that resisted completion, a Möbius strip of narrative’4
Lacey’s own words describe this high-concept memoir best, that is it is not a book with any conclusions, finite beginning or end. Reading the ‘fiction’ half first acted as a primer for what was to come - a novella that touched on themes which were more fleshed out in the ‘nonfiction’. Lacey is one of my favourite writers, and while the prose in the fiction was sharp and poignant as it always is, the ‘nonfiction’ half was by far my favourite. It opened a window of intimacy into Lacey that, to be completely transparent, felt intrusive. Lacey did not intend for the content of Möbius to ever be made public, and this is evident. The observations are so personal and introspective that it feels as though we are reading her journal - which we can assume this is where these reflections began.
Lacey, who is consistently profiled to be a intellectually formidable and perceptive woman, grants us access into her previous relationship with an abusive and psychologically manipulative partner. While all of this can be mutually exclusive, that people in these kinds of relationships can be both formidable and a victim, it felt bizarre to read. Bizarre because I read Biography of X a mere few weeks ago and I could not stop thinking of how The Reason sounded a lot like X. The theme of abuse surfaces in Lacey’s fiction in a variety of ways, and with every revelation about how The Reason treated her, my mind drew parallels between her real life and the fictitious worlds she has created. It is understandable that authors' lives shape their fiction, but to understand perhaps where Lacey’s subconscious influence for X came from was unsettling.
She acknowledges how fiction can be a mirror to the self and while it is not explicitly identified, I can’t help but assume she is talking about how her relationship with The Reason influenced how she crafted the relationship between C and X;
‘Nearly every time I’ve written a novel, something happens between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn’t know I knew while I was writing, and that buried knowledge, that unknown known, has been expressed in the fiction, just beyond my awareness’ 5
Möbius also explores Lacey reflecting on being raised in a religiously conservative environment and the effect this has on her relationship with herself. These reflections made me think of Pew and the central fight within that novel against how a conservatively religious society seeks to categorise identity. I reflected back to the anonymous protagonist of Pew and thought of Lacey as a child, surrounded by those telling her who she has to be.
While I understand the draw, I rarely ever search for details about an author and their personal life, I prefer to just enjoy their art. I love Lacey’s fiction and I think she is a once in a generation author that pushes the boundaries of what a book can be. Möbius, characteristically to Lacey, continues to push those boundaries, but in a sense that offers an insight into her fiction that I am unsure about having. When the time comes to read my next Lacey fiction, how will what I read in Möbius influence how I read?
Despite my unease in how Möbius felt invasive, Lacey para-phrases a Gilles Deleuze’s quote ‘that life is not that personal’, exemplifying that there is nothing happening to you that isn’t happening to everybody else. In her vulnerable and categorisation defying new novel, I admire Lacey’s invitation to the world to take a look at the profound complexity of her personal life. Möbius exists as an invitation to excavate the narratives we are attached to, the narratives that are put on us and the liberation in understanding how nothing is stable.
The barrier to entry to enjoying this novel is being a fan of Lacey’s work. I think my relationship with her fiction enhanced this read for me in the sense that it gave it more meaning. To read Möbius and feel as though I was revisiting themes in Pew and Biography of X, which are two of my favourite books, was fascinating. Lacey’s ex-partner is an author himself and I can’t help but admire the character assassination she has given him through this genre-bending and frankly trail blazing piece of literary work.
Transparently, if you’re not a fan of Lacey’s work, I truly don’t think you would get much out of Möbius. I read this with my friend
, a fellow Lacey admirer, and she agreed that this is a book for the super-fan. It is a high-concept look behind the curtain at what I anticipate Lacey might call one of the most challenging times in her life. The irony in all of this is that so much of this novel felt unfinished, bringing in more and more vulnerability without ever interrogating its existence. Möbius is an exploration of the perpetual middle of life, one that rarely gets written about, because all it does is result in more questions - and we live in a society that values answers. I would recommend this to any existing fans of her work and call it a borrow.
‘Trout, Belly Up’ by Rodrigo Fuentes
Trout, Belly Up is a collection of stories that are connected by a man named Don Henrik, who is constantly up against the cruel realities of family life, violence and poverty. There is very little continuity between the stories, rather Henrik varyingly exists as an in-the-background landowner, step-father, boss and partner. While Henrik’s presence is inconsistent, what is consistent is the exploration of masculinity and how it intersects with violence and creating unsettling tales in the heart of the rural landscape of Guatemala.
While a short story collection is often challenging to summarise, these stories presented the portrait of a society that is fighting to survive; trying to make a living while crops are failing, water is scarce and extortion is rife. Several stories also included an animal which represented a larger metaphor about the protagonist's relationship with themselves and those around them.
In the first story, Trout, Belly Up, the protagonist is having an affair, threatening his relationships with his wife and daughter. His job is solely to monitor the trout on Henrik’s farm - fish which are ‘delicate creatures’ and ‘can’t handle temperatures over thirteen degrees’. They circle each other constantly like a happy Trout family. But if something fluctuates in their environment, a Trout can be pushed out of the shoal towards the surface of the tank, belly up. Panic ensues and the trout start churning the water and suddenly, the belly up trout is gone - eaten by their family. In Whisky, a recovering addict and father gets a new dog called Whisky. The dog’s nature is endearing and energetic, constantly playing with his daughter, until Whisky watches his owner relapse. He runs away and can be heard howling in the distance, lost to the landscape. Both the Trout and Whisky represent a relationship humanity has to destruction that the men can’t see. Intoxicated by the landscape and the hardship surrounding them, they are blind, perhaps by choice, to the environments they create around them.
This collection felt like a window into Guatemala, a glance into what life can be like there. While short stories are often something I don’t overly reach for, they manage to capture such a variety of snapshots that a novel cannot. They operate as an opportunity to learn more about a different culture and climate, especially translated collections. Fuentes' prose captivatingly tells stories with both a distinct sense of variety and continuity. While most stories could be categorised as bleak or perhaps depressing, ultimately they are full of life in all the ways humanity and society are flawed. What is the point in exploring our humanity unless it does so as a whole?
I’d recommend this collection and call it a borrow! It is short, punchy and details a Guatemalan society that I had previously no insight into. Funete’s weird and captivating prose creates a fascinatingly bizarre collection of stories.
‘The Little I Knew’ by Chiara Valerio
In Scauri, a seaside hamlet in Italy, Vittoria dies unexpectedly in her bath. When Vittoria arrived in Scauri thirty years earlier, she was shrouded in mystery. Scauri was a town that people often left, so why did she choose to move there? Vittoria’s arrival was mysterious in more ways than one, because she was wealthy, highly educated and lived with another woman called Mara. The town was left puzzled; was Mara her daughter, a niece, a friend? Despite obscurity, her difference was accepted almost seamlessly and Vittoria quickly became part of the social fabric of Scauri.
While most of the townsfolk react to Vittoria’s death with sad, but respectful, southern Italian silence, Lea, Vittoria’s friend and the town's lawyer, starts to investigate - how did a woman who swims in the sea every day die in the bath? More specifically, who even was Vittoria? Who is Mara and why did they move to a seemingly random hamlet by the sea? Vittoria’s death disrupts the traditional rhythm of life that exists in this portrait of a small town.
Valerio has crafted an elegant whodunit that interrogates the visible, and invisible, lives of women in a patriarchal society. The novel interrogates the performance of gender, class and sexuality in a small conservative town in Italy. Our protagonist, Lea, a mother and a lawyer, was born and raised in Scauri and chose to stay, despite having a desire to leave. She juggles the maternal and professional spheres of her life with an almost untraceable difficulty, frequently musing on whether she truly loves her husband and the seemingly random nature of human existence;
‘Why had I said yes to Luigi? What had she said yes to [redacted]? Do you die by accident and get married because you’re in a good mood?’ 6
Lea has been brought up in a traditional catholic environment and has exceeded society's expectations; she has children, she’s married and she works!7 But in investigating her friend's mysterious death, Lea wonders about another life she could have lived, one where she explores her less conventional desires.
The Little I Knew is driven by the unknown mystery of Vittoria’s life and death, and the familiar performance of the patriarchy and heterosexuality. I thought this novel was brilliant in its quiet exploration of what it means to live a life on your terms, one that is truly your own. It challenges the unquestioned moral superiority that is often found within those who have followed the prescribed social norms and not considered looking at life from a different angle.
I will refrain from commenting anymore on the atmosphere of this novel at the risk potentially ruining it for any potential reads. This is the perfect literary thriller that has an air of Agatha Christie mystery. In investigating the unexpected death of a Vittoria, Valerio deftly interrogates the systems we live under and how they subconsciously shape our lives, perhaps without us realising. The Little I Knew quietly challenges what it means to ascribe, and to perform, to the ‘structures’ of society. I would recommend this and call it a buy! It is a perfect summer read - I devoured this in only a few sittings, compelled and entranced by Valerio’s gorgeous prose and expertly crafted mystery. It reminded me in many ways of A Spring of Love in its exploration of gendered performance - a book that I loved last year and will take any opportunity to recommend again!
And that concludes my May Reads! My favourite books this month were ‘Kick The Latch’ and ‘The Little I Knew’ - they were both brilliant, but the competition wasn’t exactly tough.
My first reads for June are ‘Chilco’ by Daniela Catrileo and ‘Solenoid’ by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu (obviously).
Let me know your thoughts:
❀ What have you read and enjoyed in May?
❃ Have you read any of these books? Would you like to?
❁ Do you have any book recommendations for me based on the themes of this month?
☀︎After a very average reading month, I’d love from recommendations from you! Is there anything you have read recently you think I’d like? If so, TELL ME.
Thank you, as always, for reading!
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Happy Reading! Love Martha
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I endeavour to always introduce you to books that don’t get coverage elsewhere - that is a promise.
p.159 in ‘Kick The Latch’
p.141 in ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’
p.142 in ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’
p.118 in ‘The Möbius Book’
p.6 in ‘The Möbius Book’
p.119 in ‘The Little I Knew’
God forbid!
Oh I have wanted to read Kick the Latch for so long!!! I must get to it.
I'm also interest in Trout, Belly Up and the new Lacey from this list.
Here's hoping your June reading is better!!
I absolutely adored Kick the Latch. I read Aug 9-Fog, it was ok (like a found journal). But I loved her stories Dominant Animals.