November Reads
Home, the power of storytelling and belief systems.
Welcome to ‘Martha’s Monthly’, November Reads edition! The books I read in November all circled around similar themes of home, storytelling and belief systems. Several explored the emotional home you create in the absence of a physical one. They reflected on the role storytelling plays within shaping our perception of the world and the function of belief systems in sustaining hope and humility.
To see the translated reads from November on Martha’s Map, including authors from Colombia, Taiwan, Moldova and Russia, 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 well worth a read. Bust = I wouldn’t recommend this book from my reading experience.
‘My Friends’ by Hisham Matar
On the 17th April 1984, a demonstration took place in front of the Libyan embassy in London. When shots were fired into the crowd from the windows of the embassy, ten people were injured and one police officer was killed.1 Khaled and Mustafa, two Libyan eighteen-year-olds who met at Edinburgh university, are among the wounded. Their act of recklessness and courage at the demonstration exiles them to England forever; they are now targets of Qaddafi’s regime in Libya and unable to return home. Once recovered after weeks spent in hospital, Khaled does not return to his studies in Edinburgh out of fear he, or his family, will be murdered. Instead, he hides in London. In the absence of a homeland, or his family, Khaled seeks a home within his friends, Mustafa and Hosam, a writer. When a revolution happens in Libya many years later, it forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind. Bound by their shared history and political exile, My Friends is a beautiful meditation on love, friendship and home.
The narrative of My Friends takes place across one day after Khaled has dropped Hosam off at Kings Cross. In the wake of Hosam leaving London to go to America, and the possibility that he will never see him again, Khaled walks home reflecting on all that came before; how he ended up in London and the friends he made along the way. The novel consists of snapshots of reflection written in richly meditative sentences. Matar’s structure and style takes a minute to warm up to, but once I was familiar, I could not stop reading his addictively beautiful prose.
described My Friends as ‘deeply human’ and because I read her review a matter of days before I started reading the novel myself, I could not stop thinking about it.My Friends is deeply human and familiar. Political exile is not familiar for most, but the experiences of friendship, love and a yearning for home are. Through the experiences of Khaled and his friends, Matar conveys the profound complexities of a life affected by the actions of those in power and the impact this can have on people. While differences are entrenched by political leaders and borders, our love for friends and family, our experience of fear, is universal. Among it all is a humanity we all share. Matar is communicating the age-old, yet forever relevant, point that we are not all as different as we think.
Khaled experiences significant losses being in exile, but most considerable is the loss of home. The heartbreak Khaled feels at not being able to return home moved me to tears multiple times and feels too emotional to try and convey in this review. There is an intimacy found between Khaled, Mustafa and Hosam that their friendship is synonymous with the feeling of home in the absence of one. In the Authors Note, Matar says;
‘This is a novel about friends in exile and the emotional country that certain deep friendships can come to resemble. [...] If friendship is an education, it is, at least in this one regard, similar to literature’ p.457 in My Friends
My Friends is full of pride but sadness as the novel explores the beauty of friendships and all that they are, and become, in the absence of family. Khaled reflects the sense of home, the emotional country, he has gained through them. While My Friends is a story about Khaled, it is more a story about how those around him have shaped and influenced his life. As someone who loves my friends as much as Matar seems to, a novel about the emotional worlds you build within them filled me with love.
Alongside poignant commentary on the role of friendship within our lives, My Friends offers a deeply human meditation on our existence within the natural world;
‘Where would humanity be without morning? Even the most violent need is calmed by dawn, and you can almost catch the fresh sense of hope’ - p.44 in My Friends
Matar’s writing explores that so little of life is guaranteed except the sun rising. That no matter the circumstance, he ruminates that life is more than to be reduced to fighting, hatred and the decisions of the political elite. That the ‘most important dramas take place not on the battlefields but in the quiet hours’ and there is always beauty to be found in the continual promise of morning. These reflections on our existence within a world that is so much more than we are feels pertinent, perhaps now more than ever.
My Friends is not without fault as I felt the narrative did begin to lose grip at the end, finishing in a place that did not feel quite right. However, the story Matar is telling is beautiful and I cannot recommend it enough. There is great pain within this novel, but there is great love to be found too. I loved every moment with this richly contemplative book and would call it a buy. I can’t believe this is the first of Matar’s works I have read. I am eyeing up A Month in Siena and In The Country of Men next.
‘An Orphan World’ by Giuseppe Caputo is about a father and son who struggle to survive in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood that lies between the city and the sea. In the face of their hardships, they come up with increasingly bizarre and imaginative plans in order to survive; their imaginations are their greatest strength. When a horrifying, macabre event rocks the neighbourhood's gritty bar district and the locals start to flee, father and son are forced to stay put. For them, all that matters to them is staying together. Yet alongside an exploration of a life in extreme poverty, An Orphan World is telling another story. Caputo juxtaposes a tender father and son relationship with the son’s experiences as a gay man. Together, the novel tells a story of a life full of discrimination and defiance.
An Orphan World is a fantastical novel that is difficult to interpret because the tone clashes with the story. The story is violent and abhorrent as father and son struggle to live in horrendous conditions. The narrative tells the heartbreaking experience of what life is like for those who have nothing; who are forgotten by society. However, the tone is one of fantastic absurdity as Caputo characterises father and son with an exceptional reliance on their imagination to cope. The prose is upbeat and full of love; they call the city ‘electric forest’ and the walls of their home are blank canvases waiting to be covered in drawings. This exploration of the relationship between poverty and imagination reminded me of the twins' in ‘On The Savage Side’ by McDaniel. Both novels play with the power of the mind and the world that can be made in the absence of one, suggesting that while there are things we can lack, our imagination will never be one of them.
Caputo interconnects these themes of social marginalisation and desire throughout the son's narration. The son has a conflicted relationship with visibility. Poverty makes him and his father go unnoticed in society, and he naturally yearns for this to change. However, there is a conflicted desire with his visibility as a gay man as he experiences and witnesses homophobic violence. When he is with his father, he desires food, electricity and home comforts. When he is alone, he desires intimacy, exploration and empowerment. Together, these desires explore the complexities of identity in a harsh society where there is no protection against personal or financial hardship.
When together, father and son share tender moments. When alone, the son explores his sexuality and goes to sex parties which are (to put it politely) not tender. These chapters were the most sexually explicit writing I have ever read in a book. Perhaps what is most fascinating here is Captuo’s decision to use such uncomfortable and horrifying prose to describe the son's lived experiences as a gay man, but sincere and beautiful prose to describe living in severe deprivation. This contrasting tone is jarring but provides thought provoking consideration to what social marginalisation is deemed acceptable to discuss by society. It explores how merely existing can become an act of resistance for those who are marginalised.
Thus, An Orphan World subsequently argues that social marginalisation is not just a problem for the living, but also for the dead. Both those who die in poverty with no money to cover healthcare or funeral costs, and those who die at the hands of targeted homophobic violence, are unable to choose their last moments on earth. It suggests that those who are marginalised can struggle to find peace in death and to die with dignity.
Caputo has written a truly experimental novel with An Orphan World. I was deeply impressed with his ability to balance a tale of love and defiance with one of violence and discrimination, all while eliciting genuine humour throughout. I thoroughly enjoyed being challenged by this novel and would call it a borrow. I would recommend An Orphan World to anyone who enjoys reading about the love that can exist between father and son and the beauty of the imagination. Equally, about the complexity of discrimination and identity and how the extensive impact this has on those who experience it.
‘Wellness’ by Nathan Hill reads as a novel consisting of two different books. Hill attempts to tackle sprawling philosophical concepts about modern life and what makes a great love story. He tries to bridge the chasm of these stories with one theme; technology. Singularly, I think both of these stories have so much going for them. But together? Not so much.
The first story is of an American couple who have been married for twenty years but no longer recognise each other. When Jack and Elizabeth, two idealistic bright eyed students, meet in the 90s, they immediately fall in love. Between them, they are youthful dreamers who believe they are soulmates who will change the world. In their imagined future, life will be the white picket fence American dream; full of love. Nevertheless, by spending too much time idealising their lives, they fail to accurately perceive themselves or each other. By creating a relationship around ideals instead of reality, Jack and Elizabeth are destined for unhappiness.
This story of modern marriage is one that is familiar to many. The narrative joins Elizabeth and Jack in their midlife crisis and they both feel denuded. They are experiencing difficulties characteristic to modern life; homeownership, full time working parenthood and feeling unfilled in one's career. Hill paints a picture of a relationship where love is lost through alternating point-of-views into their lives, where they sleep in separate beds and barely communicate. It is depressing to read, but having set these characters up with a Romeo and Juliet-equse love story, we hold out hope that it will get better. Here, Hill brings in the theme of technology into Elizabeth and Jack’s lives. He explores how technology has inherently changed the landscape of our relationships. That the ever expanding gamification of our lives, and the relationship we have to our phones, gravely impacts our ability to just be and experience connection.2
The second story is an interrogation of modern existence, a philosophical meditation on our psychology and how we exist in the world. This interrogation is undertaken through the context of America, the insecurity of the nation and subsequently the lives of those within it. This exploration around contemporary life is characterised by Elizabeth and Jack’s relationship. Hill uses the commencement of their relationship as a collision point with the rising technological and cultural change in America felt by the internet. They become a representation of change in America. Like Adam and Eve, Elizabeth and Jack are a turning point in humanity.
Elizabeth and Jack’s family histories, which we are made privy to, seem to represent a binary of American life. Elizabeth comes from generations of exploitative success, with her lineage reading like a metaphor for the founding fathers; their wealth is inherent. Contrastingly, Jack’s family are salt-of-the-earth Americans from a small and isolated town. They are fiscally poor but rich in knowledge of the land. They are being left behind by the new technological world and increasingly falling out of touch. These threads of stories create a tapestry of the myth making of America. While Jack and Elizabeth’s union could be perceived as how contemporary life is a great leveller, presumably Hill is trying to communicate that life in America has never been more polarised.
The role of technology is present throughout the novel as a negative aspect of our lives; one that needs distancing from. Wellness argues that while life has always been precarious, we have never understood it less. Technology interferes with our relationships, sense of selves and nationhood. Hill attempting to demonstrate the insecurity of literally everything in this novel was ambitious. The narrative frequently loses its way because of the lamenting deep dives that episodically plague the prose. These diatribes (or as
described them, ‘viral millennial think pieces’) dominate around half the book and bury the plot a great deal of noise. These transgressions into a midlife existential crises were tedious to read.Underneath the weight of it all, I think the story Hill is attempting to tell about love and humanity is wonderful. The birth, evolution and decline of nations aside, all that remains and perhaps that is all that is certain is our humanity. However, by endeavouring to scrutinise the pitfalls of modern life, our relationship with technology and on our psychology as human beings, Hill bit off more than he could chew.
Towards the end of the novel there are some beautiful quotes which speak to our existence (see below), but I had to read five-hundred pages to get there;
‘People do this all the time, in life. They find a view of the world that agrees with them, a spot that feels safe and secure, and they plant themselves on that spot and don’t move. Because if they did move, their certainty and security and safety in the world would fall apart, and that's too scary and painful to contemplate. [...] In the face of insurmountable threats and distressing precarity and pain, the body longs, more than anything, for certainty’ p.543 in Wellness
I loved the ideas in this novel; I love love and ruminating on philosophical concepts, but together they did not work for me. There were moments of complete brilliance; the ingeniously paced revelations throughout and everything to do with Elizabeth’s job (which I couldn’t find a way to discuss without giving spoilers), and at these moments, I loved it. However they did not last and frequently moved into more sprawling diatribes. Thus the magic was gone.
chose this novel for us to read together and I think her disappointment with the novel was more fervent than mine. I had low expectations because it is almost entirely out of my reading comfort zone and has reaffirmed that I am my own (flawless) tastemaker. It was deeply captivating at points and tediously ponderous at others. I would call Wellness a borrow because it contained multitudes. The central messaging of the novel is an honesty about modern life that is rarely explored in such detail. While deeply existential, it remained hopeful about the humility and love humanity can possess.
‘Notes Of A Crocodile’ by Qiu Miaojin is a coming of age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship and affinity while studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Our narrator, an anonymous lesbian nicknamed Lazi, tells the stories of herself and her peers through a collection of diary entries, vignettes and love letters that house aphorisms about society in late 1980’s Taipei. Lazi is afflicted by her attraction for an older woman and turns to her circle of friends for support. They include a rich kid turned criminal and his self destructive lover, as well as a mischievous overachiever and her artist girlfriend. Within this array of slightly indistinguishable characters is the very distinguishable illustration of the liberation from the strictures of gender norms. Notes Of A Crocodile is a deeply romantic and existential exploration about what it means to love yourself, and others. This is the conflict of embracing and understanding who you are in an environment where you are not accepted.
Lazi is a funny and intelligent narrator who clearly hates herself. It is devastating to read her seeking love, yet constantly fighting with herself. We are Lazi’s confident, a reader of her most intimate thoughts. There is a rich array of characters in Notes Of A Crocodile who are all in some form struggling with their queer selves, repressing or embracing to various degrees. Every character within this novel exists in the context of fear because of the post-martial-law society of late 1980s Taipei. Today Taiwan is recognised as one of the most ‘queer friendly’ Asian countries, but this is a stark contrast to the country that Miaojin grew up in. This novel exists between two dramatically different Taiwan’s - one extremely homophobic, and one much more accepting. Notes Of A Crocodile meditates on what it means to have gay rights so intertwined with state behaviour and ideology, asking how ‘quickly’ can attitudes change and will who we love ever stop being political?
Throughout the novel exists episodic passages about a crocodile wearing a human suit out of fear of being discovered by the media and the public. It describes being hidden in plain sight and the terrifying reality of living somewhere where who you are is vilified to such grandeur. The crocodile exists as a metaphor for queer individuals in Taiwan at the time, the human suit representing performative heteronormativity. This metaphor was exquisite and profound. I would have loved this metaphor to be more expansive and taken even further, it was my favourite part of the novel. While many threads of the narrative were hard to discern at times, the crocodile wearing the human suit was consistently substantive.
A Taiwanese media scandal in 1993 saw a TV journalist secretly film women at a lesbian bar in Taipei and broadcasted the footage on the evening news. It led to the unexpected outing of several women and multiple suicides because of the shame.3 This is the cultural atmosphere in which Miaojin wrote Notes Of A Crocodile. A year after finishing the novel, Miaojin committed suicide. With this knowledge, Notes Of A Crocodile reads with a profound melancholy. With self hatred and depression taking centre stage in the novel, there appears to be parallels between the author's lived experience and that of Lazi and it is hard not to wonder if this is a form of autofiction - but truthfully, we don’t know.
The narrative was at times confusing in its episodic jumping. I wish I grasped earlier that there is no discernable plot, because I spent half the novel trying to track a plot that did not exist. While the readability of this novel is sometimes awkward, the emotional exploration in this book is remarkable. Miaojin’s commentary on gender, sexuality and the spectrum of what is ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ remains painfully relevant. It illuminates a life lived in a society that views gender and behaviour in such binary ways. Notes On A Crocodile is deeply insightful about the anguish and pain that was experienced by queer people in 1980s Taipei, and will still exist in other parts of the world today. While I don’t believe in queer novels existing for the edification of heteronormative society, Notes On A Crocodile humanises an existence that is often left out of cultural and historical commentary. Miaojin was the first woman in Chinese literature to come out as openly gay and if you are interested in reading more about her, I recommend this piece.
I enjoyed researching the life of Qiu Miaojin, and the history of Taiwan, perhaps slightly more than the novel itself. However, I would still recommend it and call it a borrow. Some of the passages on what it means to be in love were beautiful and I would recommend this just on the basis that I think everyone should read the metaphor of the crocodile in a human suit. That was some of the most creative and compelling prose I have read in a long time. I am not sure if I will read the other posthumous publication of Miaojin’s work, but if anyone else has and says it is worth my time, please let me know!
‘Out Of The Sun’ by Esi Edugyan
A play on the phrase ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’, Out Of The Sun is a collection of essays that reveal the blind stops and constraints of the white, western narrative. Through a woven historical and personal narrative, Edugyan addresses the global legacy of erasure. She explores the complexities of racial representation in the construction of history and storytelling, demonstrating there are a wealth of stories hidden in the margins. By bringing these stories to light, Edugyan shakes the foundation of the stories we are told about the history of humanity. The result is five absorbing and illuminating essays on the African diaspora, bringing them to the centre.
Out Of The Sun seeks to tell the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. European Empires have long shaped the narrative, frequently purporting that the history of certain countries and civilisations only started from the moment European settlers arrived there; dictating who is part of history and who is not. This narrative is articulated perhaps most powerfully by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who said there is no African history before Europeans arrived there, that ‘the rest is largely darkness’.4
Edugyan’s first essay is a meditation on art and representation in Europe. This was by far my favourite, I found it engrossing. She explores the presence, or absence, of African subjects in Western paintings such as David Martin’s Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Elizabeth Murray and Johann Gottfried Haid’s Portrait of Angelo Soliman. Edugyan explores the absence of Black people in paintings and that those we do see are often in roles of subjugation. This is articulated by Dido and Angelo both being memorialised with white turbans on their heads, to signify the ‘Orient’ to ‘other’ them. If art is a mirror to society, how does this impact and shape the way we view history? She argues that these portraits raise the questions of how human migration, both forced and chosen, has shaped the West for centuries. 5 What was the role of the few inclusions of Black people in art in the eighteenth century?;
‘Black people are present, but as footmen, slaves, lady maids and magi. [...] If one of the unavoidable eventualities of art is to act as social history, what story is being handed down to us? Black bodies are less living, breathing people than repositories for cultural anxieties. Blacks are an expression of status, of christianity’s reach, of white morality. They are rarely, until the twentieth century, just human beings, living human lives’ p.9 in Out Of The Sun
Edugyan explores how the relationship between Black bodies in art has changed over time. An example of the persistent Eurocentric narrative is The Creation of God by Harmonia Rosales who subverts Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam to present the first human, and God, as Black women. The backlash Rosales received for this image is remarkable, and begs the question of who decided that the first people were white and why has this Eurocentric perception been accepted as verbatim for so long? 6 Edugyan explores an array of artists, portraits and paintings that I would like to write about for the entire length of this newsletter; but I won’t, because there are some other themes I want to highlight. The love for this essay on ‘Europe and The Art of Seeing’ has reminded me of how much I love the history of art. I’m eager to read ‘The Whole Picture: The Colonial story of the Art in our Museums’ by Alice Procter to continue to learn about the political act of commemoration and the legacy of art in the context of the British Empire.
In the essay ‘Canada and the Art of Ghosts’, Edugyan explores the legacies of Ghost stories in Canada to ask who is being forgotten in cultural storytelling and why? By exploring the dead that cultures choose to see, the essay attempts to understand what stories are withheld because they contain people of colour. Edugyan analyses the cultural reverence of Ghost stories in Canada against some of the known history of Black people in the country to explore Canada’s absence of racial discussion and inclusion in their history.
In the essay ‘America and the Art of Empathy’, Edugyan articulates the role of race in America. She explores how in the absence of understanding, benign physical differences become the fiction into which society pours pent-up frustration and rage.7 The crossroads of race in America is perhaps most intriguingly explored through racial passing. While the phenomenon of racial passing is not unique to America, the history of it in the country is instructive. If, historically, we understand racial passing as a way for Black people to gain the privileges denied by the law (like in Passing by Nella Larsen) what are we to make of people who pass the other way?
Today ‘blackfishing’ and cultural appropriation are terms that are widely understood. Those who engage in cultural appropriation today are (almost) universally condemned and considered racist in public and private circles. 8 While acknowledging the complexity of racial passing, Edugyan explores the history of what we consider as Blackface today. She explores the ventriloquism certain white individuals, such as Ray Springle, played for the edification of white society, articulating the experience of Black people in the Jim Crow South. 9 Edugyan argues how instrumental Springle was in vocalising the lives of Black people that were literally unimaginable to white society. The complexity of racial identity in America is extensive. This is highlighted by Edugyan exploring stories that are hidden because of the racial politics that characterise American society.
I loved this collection of thought provoking and revealing essays about the stories hidden in the shadows. I could have read a thousand more pages of this poignant exploration of ‘the truth’ throughout history, art and storytelling. Edugyan has written a collection of engrossing and accessible essays on those whose stories are hidden. The way she weaved her own personal experiences as a Black woman, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, in constant dialogue throughout the collection made the narrative refreshing. Out Of The Sun is a buy and I cannot recommend it enough. As I conclude this review, I want to leave you with this quote from Edugyan on the act, and art, of storytelling;
‘Storytelling is as old as humanity, and is one of the means by which we seek to define and understand ourselves [...] The meaning of stories resides in their ability to establish that life is less random than it can seem. Stories locate people within places, and affix histories [...] Stories can be illuminating, but they can also be cages, forcing people into roles and histories into verdicts that bear little relation to the truth’ p.173 in Out Of The Sun
‘Too Great A Sky’ by Liliana Corobca is narrated by Ana as she recalls her life for her great granddaughter. She tells her story with unflinching honesty as she chronicles her sorrowful, but sometimes joyful, experience of exile and deportation. Ana recounts a life characterised by forced departures and difficult returns because of border disputes. At eleven years old, Soviet Soldiers send Ana and her mother from Bucovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. Whole villages are purged and thousands forced to make the brutal three-week-long journey via train. The trains are overcrowded, cold and tortuous. Death is everywhere but despite it all signs of life persist between them as they create a world of storytelling, riddles and poetry to help survive. Together, language becomes their belief system and tool for survival. Many years later, the war ends and Ana is no longer held in political exile. However, after so many years of seismic social upheavals, forced labour and abuse, can she return home to a place that no longer exists?
Too Great A Sky is a heartbreaking story about deportation and exile. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed parts of Greater Romania under the terms of the non aggression treaty between Hitler and Stalin. These areas, Bessarabia and Bucovina, roughly translate today to Moldova, Ukraine and Romania. The counties of Cernǎuti, Storojinet, Dorohoi and Rǎdǎuti remain to this day as parts of Ukraine and Romania.10 Essentially, Too Great A Sky tells the story of the territorial disputes and border changes that were extensively suffered in Eastern Europe and the effect this had on identity. It recalls the extreme suffering experienced because of the redrawing of borders. Russia’s invasion and ongoing kidnapping and deporation of Ukrainian children in an attempt to eradicate their identity reminds us that the story told in Too Great A Sky is far from a distant memory.11 It tells a story often not told about the history of suffering in Eastern Europe that is frequently overshadowed.
The suffering detailed within the novel is unimaginable, but Corobca paints a vivid picture of it through her prose. Ana, her mother and the rest of the community of Kazakhs, Tatars, Uyghurs, Kyrgyz and Uzbek’s are starving. Forced to live in deprivation as they are transported to ‘the end of the road’ in Kazakhstan. They suffer further starvation once they arrive and their lived experience is horrific. Taken to the liminal land of Siberia where there is almost no life, the novel focuses on how these people kept going and the currency that storytelling became. Corobca details the stories, cultural traditions and poetry from these countries and the role this storytelling played in maintaining a connection to the cultural homelands they had been ripped away from. The novel addresses the resistance that is found between people in intimate spaces through the act of hope and storytelling.
‘A heart without hope is like a quiver of arrows without a bow’ -p.264 in Too Great A Sky
Ana tries to bridge the gap of time to her great granddaughter and stories that have been lost. Too Great A Sky explores how quickly cultures, languages and traditions can be lost in just a few generations. Through her storytelling, it is illuminated how much the world has changed since, and with this change comes a forgetting of all that they endured. Ana’s forthright storytelling about the abuse she suffered is an act of defiance as she does not want those who were lost to be forgotten. Ana recounts the reparations she was given, that told her she ‘wasn’t at fault for being deported’ to which she articulates that, at eleven years old, how could it have been her fault?
Ana has witnessed all the human life that is lost because of the political and military decisions of a few. She conveys that it is not just your future taken from you, but also your past. Her entire understanding of home was uprooted as she, and many others, were forced to force a new identity against their will;
‘They took us to a godless land and from sweet Bucovina banned,
To our own country never to return, and forever there to yearn,
Lost among aliens, all because we’re Romanians.
Sing it out, if you can, we found ourselves in Kazakhstan.
Ravens have their chicks and home, we were left there all alone’ p.125 in Too Great A Sky
Too Great A Sky is a story of existing, despite it all, and a life that has been dictated by the never ending conflict over borders. Corobca endeavours to communicate that life can be taken away, and given back to you, in the blink of an eye. Identities are forcibly changed and hate between nationalities because of cultures and religion is encouraged. Despite it all, the novel reflects that people are the same everywhere, both the good and the bad. The themes the novel explores are persistently relevant, lamenting that storytelling is everything; that we cannot let stories of such grave suffering die with generations passed, because it reminds us what those who came before us endured. At times the novel arguably descends into being preachy about how hard life was back then, but after the details of Ana’s story, the tone feels acceptable.
Ana, a wise woman full of stories, expresses how wealth and technology divide people and make them strangers. While instructive, it is hard to disagree. It does make you wonder what stories, poems and cultural traditions we could exchange about our heritage? I loved the lyrics, poems and learning about a corner of the world I previously knew nothing about. Corobca writes with a moving honesty that I have not encountered for a long time. Too Great A Sky is a historical fiction like no other I have ever read. The songs included in the novel were based on songs composed by deportees and sung by survivors. Corobca collected many of the folk beliefs present in the novel from her own village in Moldova.12 Too Great A Sky is a fictionalised story, yet Corobca and Cure appear to have taken such care to ensure the story told was as accurate as possible. A window into a completely different world, this is a beautiful novel and a buy I strongly recommend to everyone.
‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky is narrated by Raskolnikov, a poor failure of a young man who lives in St Petersburg. He was a student at the university but had to drop out due to financial hardship. Struggling to make ends meet and feeling increasingly guilty about the financial impact his decision to study has had on his family, Raskolnikov is contemplating committing an awful crime, but we are yet to know the nature. In the meantime he decides to exchange a watch for some money to the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and go drinking. After hearing that Alyona Ivanovna will be alone in her apartment the next day, he finds an axe and sets off to kill her. After committing a brutal double murder, we are privy to his frenzied consciousness as he experiences a mixture of self-loathing, pride and contempt for what he's done. While the rest of St Petersburg attempts to uncover who committed the murder, we follow Raskolnikov in his frantic efforts to probe and confront both his motives and consequences of his crime. Will he ever be found out and will he ever admit what he has done?
I read for pleasure and escapism (obviously) but I also read to challenge myself. Crime and Punishment is not a book I picked up for pleasure and is what I have been building up to read all year with my classic-novel-of-the-month-goal. I will happily admit this novel terrified me and I just wanted to see if I could do it. At the end of the day, it is just a book. 13
Crime and Punishment is an exploration of the social and psychological turmoil experienced by Raskolnikov in the wake of his crime. The most central theme to this novel is poverty and the powerful effect this plays on Raskolnikov. Poverty is understood to be the driving force for Raskolnikov’s crime, killing the pawnbroker in an attempt to acquire some wealth. As a young man Raskolnikov is consumed by his lack of social class and the way others perceive him. He feels tortured by his lack of financial mobility and cannot escape the torture of believing others view him as inferior because of this. Almost all the characters in Crime and Punishment are desperately poor and it is the backdrop of almost all behaviour within the novel. Many characters experience great difficulty in securing food and shelter in the shifting political and social values of nineteenth-century Russia. Dostoevsky weaves poverty and morality together throughout the novel, creating a complex picture of what is right and wrong.
Dostoevsky seems to suggest that the lawful punishment of a crime is much less frightening than the anguish experienced in trying to avoid it. Initially, Raskolnikov views himself as someone intellectual and superior; above the moral rules that govern the rest of humanity. Together, this belief system and what he deems as his entirely unjust experience of poverty drives him to behave as though he needs to resist the mediocrity of humanity. These concepts of Raskolnikov’s psyche lead to him expressing that he did not kill a human being, but ‘instead a principle’ which comes from the philosophy of utilitarianism; an action that makes the most people happy is moral. Dostoevsky seems to be using Raskolnikov to analyse this philosophical belief as a failure.
Perhaps what was most interesting to me outside of the novel was learning about Dostoevsky’s life. Dostoevsky had an incredibly personal relationship with ‘crime and punishment’, with himself being arrested and sentenced to death by firing squad for his membership of a literary group called the Petrashevsky Circle. Pardoned at the last moment, Dostoevsky was then exiled for four years in a hard labour camp in Siberia and classified as ‘one of the most dangerous convicts’. Dostoevsky’s relationship with imprisonment and exile made Crime and Punishment much more interesting to me. While reading I was often incredibly occupied with imagining how Dostoevsky’s own experience shaped this novel. He frequently questioned the binary labelling of people are ‘good’ and ‘evil’, instead arguing everyone is a mixture of both.
Nevertheless, there were times this novel dragged. I found the beginning and the end exceedingly compelling, but most of the middle ponderous. The plot spends a significant chunk of time moving away from Raskolnikov’s crime and instead discussing the marriage prospects of his sister and the extensive hardships suffered by those in extreme poverty in St Petersburg. While not entirely irrelevant, I did find it frustrating that we were not always discussing the murder and Raskolnikov’s psychological anguish. I found the discussions about who his sister would, or would not marry, tiresome and I admittedly skim read a lot of these parts because my interest waned.
Overall, I’d say if you have always been interested in reading Crime and Punishment, but have avoided it out of fear, I’d recommend you read it. It is easy enough to follow (much easier than The Master and Margarita which I read in the summer) and the themes tackled by Dostoevsky are poignant. However, if you have no interest in it I would not make it my place to convince you. While I enjoyed parts, there were many others I didn’t. I would call this a borrow and I would like to read Dostoevsky again as I enjoyed his exploration of morals. I’m thinking of reading White Nights before the spring which is considerably shorter than Crime and Punishment, a change in length I would welcome!
And that concludes my November Reads! My favourite books of the month were ‘My Friends’ and ‘Out Of The Sun’.
My first book of December is A Spring of Love by Celia Dale which was first published in 1960 and has since fallen out of print, but Daunt Books Publishing have given Dale a new lease of life!
Let me know your thoughts:
❀ What have you read and enjoyed in November?
❃ Have you read any of these books? What did you think?
❁ Do you have any final reading goals or ambitions for the year? Is there one book you’re dying to get to before 2024 ends? For me, it’s ‘Independent People by Halldór Laxness’.
Thank you, as always, for reading. Let me know if you found a book or two you’d like to read! I’m sorry this newsletter was a few days late - I was unwell and couldn’t finish it in time. I appreciate all the love that has been sent my way while you’ve waited! <3
This will be my last newsletter of 2024. Thank you all so much for the love and your readership on the newsletter this year, I am incredibly grateful. My reading life has been enriched so much by all of you!
I will see you in January for my December Reads and for my favourite reads of 2024. I absolutely refuse to discuss my favourite reads of the year until the year is actually over, because who knows what December may bring.
I wish you all a gentle end to the year. I hope you find time to relax to read a good book.
See you next year,
Happy Reading! Love Martha
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Catch up on what you might have missed:
And what I was reading in November 2023; (I especially recommend Crooked Plow and Call Me Cassandra. I Cried To Dream Again is a memoir that has always stayed with me since I read it.)
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I endeavour to always introduce you to books that don’t get coverage elsewhere. That is a promise.
This book is a fictionalised tale but this event is not! http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/17/newsid_2488000/2488369.stm
This review was already so long I felt I had to put this in a footnote - if the topic of the intersection between sex and technology/phones interests you I enormously recommend
’s essay ‘The New York Review of Anal’ which he shared a few months ago and I think about it at least once a week. It is fascinating and brilliantly written.https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2022/1/30/qiu-miaojin-part-i - I got this fact and a lot of information on Miaojin from this site here.
Hugh Trevor-Roper said this in 1965. The full quote is “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none – there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness… and darkness is not a subject of history.”
This sentence is paraphrased from the quote ‘Dido’s portrait dredges up questions of how human migration, both forced and chosen, has shaped the west for centuries. In her escapable gaze, she seems to say, we have always been here’ p.18 in ‘Out Of The Sun’.
https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/41202/1/harmonia-rosales-repaints-classic-artworks-god-is-a-black-woman-rjd-gallery - Rosales says this in this interview which is generally very interesting and I would recommend.
This sentence is paraphrased from the quote ‘Race it seems, has become the fiction into which we pour our pent-up frustration and rage. Benign physical differences become, in the absence of understanding, stand-ins for an enemy we cannot visibly see’ on p.204 in Out Of The Sun.
Rachel Doležal and Jessica A Krung who presented as Black to engineer disadvantage and opportunity within their professional careers. I had never come across these stories about these two women (until I read their names in this book) and I could not BELIEVE what I was reading. So outrageous I literally have no words.
Ray Springle’s newspaper series ‘I Was A Black Man For 30 Day’ published in 1948. I don’t know if you can tell by the amount of footnotes I am inserting into this review but this book was unbelievable and I could have written about it forever. I hope footnoting a small selection of some of the names and stories in these essays is giving you a great taste of the complex exploration Edugyan is undertaking.
https://wordswithoutborders.org/book-reviews/the-burden-of-knowing-exile-and-survival-in-liliana-corobcas-too-great-a-sky-monica-cure-cory-oldweiler/ - In an effort to try and understand the border changes as best I could, I found this review on Too Great A Sky that explains it in a bit more detail for anyone interested.
For links on the kidnapping and deportation of Ukrainian children - UK gov website on sanctions, the history of child abductions in Ukraine by Russia, and an Economist article about the ‘reasons’ behind Russia deporting Ukrainian children.
This information found in the translators note p.7-8 in Too Great A Sky.
Famous last words.
the way I was sooooo excited to see Too Great a Sky on your list!!!! I've been passing my copy around to just about everybody I can-- my mom, friends, classmates. I spoke with Liliana and Monica for a little interview that came out with Asymptote on Monday, and I've been desperate to keep talking about the novel, which I thought was brilliant-- the writing is so fluid and warm and transportive and open despite the violence/tragedy of the circumstances in a way that I found was outstanding & original. so glad you enjoyed it too!!
waiting on a hold for my friends so i’m glad to see another endorsement!!
i’ve read two of esi edugyan’s novels which i’d say are uneven but compelling, so i’m very intrigued by how she’d bring that storytelling gift to essays.