Book #10 We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

We Are Not Ourselves

My thanks to the publisher, Fourth Estate, for the complimentary copy

Eileen Tumilty is the child of proud Irish immigrants, a first generation Irish American, both parents struggle with alcoholism and she becomes a carer at a young age. Later, she marries Ed, but suddenly his behaviour becomes inexplicably erratic, leading them to a devastating diagnosis. 

This was a tough read for me. I felt an utter sense of detachment the vast majority of the time from any of the characters, I couldn't emotionally invest in anybody. Somehow the early years of Eileen Tumilty feel like a description of a person rather than a story with a character in it. I never really felt like I knew her. Even before Ed becomes ill, they don't have the greatest marriage, they did not seem particularly well suited and I didn't take to him as a character. Nor did I feel that I understood either of their behaviour in terms of their relationship with their son Connell.

At the books most dramatic moments, I failed to feel very moved at all, even though the story was sad, whereas normally, given the subject matter, and the events, I would have expected to cry.
Secondary characters didn't really come off the page either. I felt like characters such as Ruth, and Frank, and even cousin Pat, were not particularly fleshed out, and felt rather empty.

What is odd then, is that in spite of the fact that it's quite dry and certainly long, I did keep reading it, right through to the end, so something kept me reading. Because I never understood what made Eileen tick, I couldn't understand her decisions. Like choosing to pretty much force her declining husband out of the neighbourhood he knew for apparently racist reasons.

A puzzling experience, not a bad novel, certainly, but somehow a completely disengaging one.


Verdict : 6/10

2015 Challenge : A book set somewhere you want to visit (New York)

Book #6 Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Hausfrau 

Hausfrau will be released on 26th March 2015, my thanks to Mantle for the complimentary copy


I read Hausfrau, the debut novel from Jill Alexander Essbaum, in one night last night and I'm still thinking about it today. It's the story of Anna Benz who, after getting pregnant, married the father of her child and emigrated to Switzerland. Several years later more children have followed, but Anna has never assimilated into Swiss society and stands on the outside looking in. I was struck by the duality of my response to Anna as a character. On the one hand, I felt like I didn't understand her at all, on the other I felt as though I understood her completely.

It flummoxed me that after nine years in the country she had never made a true effort at learning the language, a thing bound to isolate. So too, that she had not learned to drive, and does not have a bank account. Is this her own failure or unwillingness to fully commit to a life chosen by accident, or something else more sinister, engendered by her husband? The question hangs in the air, neither one or the other, perhaps both.

Anna, depressed, somehow got caught in a vicious circle, a psychological rut that she does not know how to escape. Alone becomes her default, no longer just her condition, but her coping mechanism, finding Swiss society insular, she goes through a private insulation of the self, rejecting as she feels rejected and her sense of self splinters.

My favourite quote was :

It is possible to lead several lives at once. In fact, it is impossible not to. Sometimes these lives overlap and interact. It is busy work living them and it requires stamina a singular life doesn’t need. Sometimes these lives live peaceably in the house of the body. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they grouse and bicker and storm upstairs and shout from windows and don’t take out the rubbish. Some other times, these lives, these several lives, each indulge several lives of their own. And those lives, like rabbits or rodents, multiply, make children of themselves. And those child lives birth others. This is when a woman stops leading her own life. This is when the lives start leading her. 

Unsurprisingly, the stifling, controlled, isolation of her life has led to the need for an outlet. And in Anna's case the outlet becomes sex, but both this outlet and her inability to establish human connection will have dire consequences.      

I found the way that it was written really interesting, and admired it, it was reminscent of Marilynne Robinson's recent novel Lila. Anna will, for example, be at a party, in one sentence and in the very next suddenly be in bed with her lover, or at her therapy session, ( with the worlds most cold, judgemental, therapist) before being recalled back to her present. The natural habit of suddenly getting lost in a thought, an echo, a memory, and no longer feeling present in the moment or the place. By writing it in this way, it feels like we the reader are inside her head, it also further reinforces Anna's disconnect, she can never fully function because she is never in the moment.

As well as the clear contrast to Anna Karenina, Hausfrau is very much in the same tradition as Doris Lessings 'The Grass Is Singing' and Ibsen's 'A Dolls House' as a reflection on the loss of identity through marriage.

A bleak tale, certainly, yet somehow, a compelling one.

10/10

2015 Challenge : A book that takes place in another country

Book #12 The Heart Of The Matter by Graham Greene

The Heart Of The Matter

The Heart Of The Matter by Graham Greene was my Book Club's choice this month. It is the third Graham Greene novel I have read after The End Of The Affair and The Human Factor. Having read those novels, I had some idea of what to expect here, and indeed the novel shares a number of deep similarities to The End Of The Affair.

Having since googled this, four of Greene's novels, including Heart Of The Matter and End Of The Affair examined Catholic themes with Heart Of The Matter being the final one. Some at my Book Club could not understand why the protagonist becomes so deeply religious towards the end, but I, having grown up in modern Catholicism with an awareness of its history, could.

The unforgiving Catholicism on show here, in the days of the Tridentine Rite and prior to the Second Vatican Council is one I think not easily understood by a lay reader, which I think makes the book lose something in translation to the non-religious or non-Catholic.

Aside from this issue the novel covers a number of other themes. First and foremost it is a novel about Colonials and Colonial society. Various Brits abroad, largely public school educated, despairing of the heat and disparaging of the natives, illustrating as they go via their behaviour the levels to which the British Empire damaged various nations and their peoples with their sense of paternalistic right and entitlement.  

Our protagonist is Scobie, and our colony is a "West African State" later revealed by Greene to be Sierra Leone. Scobie is that rare thing, an honest man who likes the people and seeks to do the job well,  something which makes he and his wife objects of unpopularity and scorn. As the novel turns, and Scobie is forced to act in an unprincipled way, his popularity increases, a remark perhaps aimed by Greene at the corrupt nature of those who enter Foreign Service.

It is a very male book set in a man's world and I found myself frustrated that we only see women in this book in the way Scobie views them, as needy and a burden. The two main female characters Helen and Louise are two-dimensional with only merest hints that they are more than Scobie is allowing them to be. Other men like Wilson, Bagster and Harris are priggish and annoying, and perhaps in some respects, stereotypes.

Despite this the prose itself is engaging, though the novel does not really become consistently readable until perhaps mid-way through. It has dated, but is also an interesting portrait of its time, both historically speaking and in terms of comparative literature.

It is an interesting book, and I enjoyed certain lines of prose very much, but this being my third Greene, I feel like I've got a certain handle now on the type of novel he wrote and can't say I'm eager to read his complete works.

Verdict 7/10