Category: Booker Prize

Tan Twan Eng ‘The House of Doors’

No tree is every ugly Willy, but I must say I prefer the name the Malays give it, did you know they call it the whispering tree?”
“Really, why?”
“They say that if you stand under a casuarina when the moon is at its fullest you can hear its leaves whispering to you.”
“And what would they be whispering?”
“Your future and all the things that you desire to know.”
“Is it true?”
A wan smile ghosted across her face and disappeared as though it had been filched by the wind, “I’ve never heard it say anything to me” she said.

I noticed this book when I saw that it had been selected for the Booker long list and read it before the short list was announced, what a surprise that was for me to see this excellent book didn’t make the cut!Crafted from a few ideas in one of Somerset Maugham’s short stories, The Letter from his book of short stories The Casuarina Tree this story brings to life the ex-pat community living in the Malacca Straits in the early nineteenth century.

William Somerset Maugham comes to visit an old university friend Robert Hamlyn in Penang in 1921 with his American assistant Gerald. It soon becomes obvious to Lesley Hamlyn, the narrator that the two are homosexuals only 25 years after the Oscar Wilde case, Lesley at first is not too happy about their staying with her. But Willy is a very good listener and as she talks to him we understand from the opening quote that her life has not been without drama.

As a little later Willy tells her about his travels in China resulting in his book On a Chinese Screen, he suddenly realises that Lesley is no typical ex-pat wife and that there is a story here:

‘Oh, how marvellous,’ she said, ‘you must be terribly pleased.’ She noticed the title on the cover. ‘On a Chinese Screen. Very evocative. A novel?’
‘A collection of … sketches … of what I saw in China – the places I visited, the people I met.’
A watchful expression stilled her face. ‘When were you there?’
‘Two years ago.’ He patted the space on the bench beside him.
Lesley remained standing. ‘Where did you go?’
‘We started … from Shanghai. We travelled two thousand miles up the Yangtze in a rice barge, into the heart of China. The Yangtze is the longest—’
‘The longest river in China, yes, yes, I know all that. How long were you there?’
‘Four or five months. We travelled deep inland, walked our feet flat.’
‘Did you ever …’ She stopped, then began again. ‘Did you ever come across any mention of Dr Sun Yat Sen?’
‘Just about everywhere we went. Intriguing chap, from all that I heard. Speaks English fluently too, apparently. I wish I could have … met him and talked to him.’
‘He passed through here about ten years ago.’
‘Really? What was he doing in Penang?
‘Raising money for the Tong Meng Hui, his party. He planned his revolution while he was staying here, you know.’
‘Did you meet him?’
‘Robert and I did, yes. A few times.’

Lesley then, over several days tells Willy the story of her life, of the year 1911, of her meeting with Sun Wen (Sun Yat Sen) and the work she did to help collect funds for him and of her finding out about her husband Robert’s affair, She them slowly tells him of her own secret affair that followed this discovery with a Chinese man named Arthur who also worked for Sun Wen:

“Oh, don’t look so distraught my dear, it was only a matter of time before he was asked to leave you know that.” Robert turned his whiskey tumbler around in his hand volleying shards of light onto the walls. “You’ll want to see him off tomorrow, do convey my farewell to him I don’t think we’ll ever see him here again.”
He still suspected that I had been having an affair with Sun Wen. My dearest husband might have his lover and we might not have shared the same bed in years but I was still his wife. We sat there in the silence, our true thoughts camouflaged from each other. What sustained a marriage kept it going year upon year I realised were the things we left unmentioned, the truths that we longed to speak forced back down our throats back into deepest darkest chambers of our hearts.

We discover two more facts that help to explain Lesley, first of all of her lover leaving many years earlier to fight for Sun Wen and whom she has never seen again and of her realisation that Robert’s affair was with a junior male lawyer working for him.

Maugham would of course use this information for a story but as Lesley confided to him Arthur was not her lovers real name.

First published in English by Canongate Books in 2023 as ‘The House of Doors’

Claire Keegan ‘Small Things like These‘

‘Your day was long,’ Furlong said. ‘What matter,’ she said. ‘That much is done. I don’t know why I put the cake on the long finger. There wasn’t another woman I met there this evening who hadn’t hers made.’ ‘If you don’t slow down, you’ll meet yourself coming back, Eileen.’ ‘No more than yourself.’ ‘At least I’ve Sundays off.’ ‘You have them off but do you take them, is the question.’

This book shortlisted for the Booker 2022, was a slow description of life, family and place, a precise description of a period in time, capturing the community and leading us to see the pressure of the church on everyday life, how the Laundries could have existed. Keegan gives us a little hope by putting a decent man, Furlong, at the centre of the story.
How nice to find here the idioms and way of speech that I assosciate with Ireland, illustrated in the opening quote.

Furlong, who runs a fuel stuffs delivery business, coal, peat, wood and has developed ‘good Protestant habits; was given to rising early and had no taste for drink’ had reached the stage in life where he started to wonder what life was about, when he will soon be tested:

Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

Delivering early one very cold morning to the convent on the outskirts of town he goes unannounced to the coal house whose bolt was difficult to undo due to the frost and finds a young woman locked in from the outside for more than just the night, lead on the cold floor with her excrement around her. He takes her in to the convent where the mother superior gives him tea as the young woman is cleaned up and fed, she must have got locked in for a prank he’s told.
When Furlong goes back to town he is aware of the pressure to conform, to let things be. People would not understand him if he did anything. Mrs Kehoe the shop keeper warns him that they’re all a one the nuns and priests and to be careful, that the only good education available to his own children is with the teaching nuns.

The air was sharper now, without his coat, and he felt his self-preservation and courage battling against each other and thought, once more, of taking the girl to the priest’s house – but several times, already, his mind had gone on ahead, and met him there, and had concluded that the priests already knew. Sure hadn’t Mrs Kehoe as much as told him so? They’re all the one.

A straightforward forward story that captures the moment in time, 1985 just before the religious scandals of the nineties.

First published in English by Faber and Faber in 2021.

Anne Tyler “French Braid”

How did anyone really know what was really going in their kids lives. He had long ago accepted that his experience of fatherhood was not what he used to envision, the girls and he got along thank heaven but girls were more a mother’s business and so he couldn’t take much credit for that. David on the other hand, for some reason he and David had never seemed quite in step with each other.

French Braid begins with an everyday story of girl invited to meet boy’s family. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just life made up of many small details, As Serena and James head back to Baltimore by train Serena glances across the station and sees a man that makes her think of her cousin Nicolas, but how could she not recognise him?

She happened to notice a young man in a suit who had paused to let the cart roll past him. “Oh,” she said. James looked up from his phone. “Hmm?” “I think that might be my cousin,” she said in an undertone. “Where?” “That guy in the suit.” “You think it’s your cousin?” “I’m not really sure.” They studied the man. He seemed older than they were, but not by much. (It might just have been the suit.) ….. “It might be my cousin Nicholas,” Serena said. “Maybe he just resembles Nicholas,” James said. “Seems to me if it was really him, you could say for certain.” “Well, it’s been a while since we’ve seen each other,” Serena said. “He’s my mom’s brother David’s son; they live up here in Philly.”

Anne Tyler then takes us back in time through two generations of Serena’s family, to her grandparents and their young children and we observe their lives in much the same way as we had seen Serena’s first meeting with James’s parents, through the small details and we learn to see the impact of seemingly small events on people’s lives, for instance on Serena’s grandfather Robin’s reflection late in his life, illustrated by the opening quote.

Hidden in the various interactions is a day when Nicolas’s father, David, was a young boy which could be seen as one of many moments leading to his father’s reflections later in life, here is a quote as Mercy, Serena’s grand mother wanted time for herself and Robin takes responsibility for his son, but maybe in the sixties fathers didn’t understand so easily the complexities of their sons as Robin has a sink or swim view of learning to swim:

She was no stranger to water, but after a few yards or so she stopped swimming and stood up. “Come on out” Robin called to her but she said “I don’t want to get my hair wet” she had the kind of hair that took forever to dry, thick, wavy with ringlets spilling from a chignon piled high on top of her head. She said “I was thinking, I might go and fetch my sketch pad and take a little walk in the woods, can you keep an eye on David?” “Sure thing” Robin said, I’ll teach him how to swim”.

My first experience of Anne Tyler’s writing didn’t disappoint, slow moving family drama with points of denial, like many families.

First published in English by Knopf in 2022

Percival Everett ‘The Trees’

Delroy jumped a little when Brady appeared behind him. “Good Lord Almighty!” Brady said. “Goddamn! Is that Junior Junior?”
“I think so,” Delroy said. “Any idea who the nigger is?”
“None.”
“What a mess,” Brady said. “Lord, Lordy, Lord, Lord, Jesus. Looky at that. His balls ain’t on him!”

“I see that.” “I think they’re in the nigger’s hand,” Brady said. “You’re right.” Delroy leaned in for a closer look.

“Don’t touch nothing. Don’t touch a gawddamn thing. We got ourselves some kind of crime here. Lordy.”

The book shortlisted for the Booker this year, didn’t pull be in by the title and I didn’t recognise Percival Everett, but what a book! How to start describing it?

The book begins in Money Mississippi, with two gruesome murders in short succession, both related. First there’s Junior Junior found dead by two local policemen Brady and Delroy as described in the opening quote. The “person of colour“, hope I got that right, found in the same room as Junior Junior is clearly well and truly dead, with his head smashed in, both bodies are taken to the local morgue. Soon after the coloured persons body is found to be missing, no longer in the morgue drawer.

Then the book takes on a surreal form when the same corpse is found next to Junior Junior’s brother in law, Wheat’s dead body with Wheat’s “nuts” in his hand. As each of the family and the policemen’s characters are drawn, we find ourselves in a caricature of poor white people in small town Mississippi (or I hope it’s a caricature). From Wheat’s wife, Charlene, known even to her young kids by her CB handle, Hot Mama Yeller to the mortician Rev doctor Fondle addressing a KKK meeting:

We got ourselves a situation white brothers, I’m afraid what we’re looking at is a real nigger uprising two of our own brothers lay dead and the killing nigger is on the goddamn loose.

Then the second layer of the book sets in as 2 MBI agents (yes , Mississippi bureau of investigation), both black are sent to investigate, and are not exactly welcome and the FBI sends a female black agent and together are able to realise that the locals still think it’s the 1930’s.

We are clearly in “Strange Fruit” country where a very old lady has kept a record of the more than 7000 negroes Lynched in the south with less than 1% of the people involved being questioned and much less being convicted, this is proposed by any definition as being a genocide, where the only way to remember them is to keep saying their names.

Then the killings get out of hand as more and more white people are killed. Even Trump has a cameo appearance.

An excellent idea to mix a murder mystery, farce and difficult to swallow facts.

First published in English by Influx Press in 2022

Shehan Karunatilaka ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’

When did you last see him?
Weeks ago at a press gathering, said he was quitting the war zone, I thought fair enough.
Johnny should have played poker, he could lie with his eyes, his nose and his teeth
What do you know about Center?
Heard the name, think it’s some aid organisation, which could mean a number of things.
So you know them?
Not really, CNTR could be raising funds for political groups or procuring weapons for militant ones, could be genuinely helping the innocents, hard to know who’s what these days, does your papa Stanley know you’re going around playing detective Columbo?………
Do you know what’s in those five envelopes?
I don’t need to, I can guess there’s two wars going on which means a lot of ugly things get photographed.

This book was originally chosen because it was on the Booker long list, but the after much prevarication by the time I came around to reading it, it had already won the prize!
This book then, really, and in every way, will lead you into a new world, or should that be worlds.
The book begins with Maali waking up with another one of his hangovers, but he and we soon discover that he is in fact dead and is in an in between world for seven moons, or days. The narrator is then the spirit of Maali Almeida.

Maali doesn’t remember how he died, and we slowly learn about him as at first we understand that he was a war photographer and fixer in Sri Lanka in the 1980’s and that he has some potentially explosive photographs hidden in five envelopes under his bed.

Maali was a gambler, living swathes of his life in casinos where with an ability to calculate odds he more or less survives from night to night, he uses the casino to meet people for his missions but also the two loves of his life, Jaki, who he explains gambling odds to and then moves in with and through her D.D or Dilan her cousin who Maali tries to lead out of the proverbial closet. Dilan’s father Sydney is an important minister in the Sri Lankan government. Maali is missing so Dilan goes looking for him, initially to Johnny from the British Embassy from the opening quote.

We learn of the wars in Sri Lanka, of the Tigers, but also the JVP who want to overthrow the state, of the Indian peacekeeping force of the UN and the US, each with their own role to play as illustrated by the following discussion between Sydney and Dilan

We are talking about letting foreign devils meddle in our affairs.
Didn’t your excellency the president invite the Indian army in, are they angels?
I voted against that Dylan, you know this. Don’t bite your nails man how old are you?
The UN forensic team had been invited by Rajahpaksa to train our local authorities on identifying bodies against the records of the missing, meanwhile the CIA were rumoured to be training our torturers.

The choice of dead bodies and atrocities to photograph are legion, only access remains a problem, as the book moves forward we learn that Maali has been carrying out a balancing act, working for the army but also for the international press, through Johnny but also through CNTR from the opening quote and that there are any number of groups that may have wanted to kill him.

In the in between Maali meets many people he has photographed but also the Mahakali, a powerful spirit made from thousands or spirits which it seems to have absorbed (a visit to Wikipedia would be useful here).
Maali’s spirit meets the torturers and the « palace » they operate from and is lead to think about dehumanising the people that are tortured and killed:

When the mahakali comes to a stop you leap off of its back and watch it melt into shadows cast by this ugly building at the base is the face of a pole cat it gives you the same disgusted look that all dead animals give you
« What are you looking at ugly? »
I get it, animals have souls, you dream, you do things for pleasure, you feel happy and sad, you understand pain and grief and love and family and friendship, humans don’t acknowledge this because it makes it easier to carve up the ones we find tasty, which isn’t you but that’s neither here nor there. I am profoundly sorry. The pole cat looks surprised or hungry or annoyed or you don’t know it’s a pole cat.
Screw your apology it says before vanishing into the mahakali’s flesh.
There are good reasons humans can’t converse with animals except after death because animals wouldn’t stop complaining and that would make them harder to slaughter. The same may be said for dissidents and insurgents and separatists and photographers of wars. The less they are heard the easier they are forgotten.

So who did kill Maali, and will he decide to be reborn?
I would say the Booker jury got this one right.

First published in English by Sort of Books in 2022

Scoop: The Booker prize Winner 2021 (well maybe)

The Booker Prize winner will be announced today, in a world’s first scoop I can give you the winner of this prize (maybe) several hours in advance:

Here is a picture of Myself deliberating on this award with a few friends

Can I say

I’m sorry for the two I read that didnt get there, the excellent Light Perpetual Francis Spufford (Faber) and A Town Called Solace Mary Lawson (Chatto & Windus, Vintage

Have I beaten the actual Jury?

First off, I ran out of time and only managed to read 5 out of 6 of the shortlist so I have an 83% chance to have read the actual jury’s winner.

Sorry Damon Galgut

Great Circle: Maggie Shipstead:

A Passage North: Anuk Arudpragasam:

Richard Powers Bewilderment: The Promise

Nadifa Mohamed: The fortune Men

Patricia Lockwood: No One is talking About this

For the writing, for the story and for the comment on our times, The winner is of course Patricia Lockwood.

Richard Powers ‘Bewilderment’

“Booker Prize 2021: 6 Books Shortlisted for this prize.
“Bewilderment”: In order of reading book number 5.

img_0246I NEVER BELIEVED THE DIAGNOSES the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong.

In this complex father-son relationship story, Richard Powers adresses his vision of science’s view of the state of the world in a near future and paints a picture of hopelessness as we collectively head towards our own anhilation.
The narrator, Robin’s father, bringing up his special needs son alone after his wife’s accidental death, is being pushed by society towards treating his 9 year old son with opioids, as illustrated in the opening quote. He resists and one of his wife’s friends offers an experimental treatment for Robin, a new method using a neural feedback loop linked to AI, Robin’s mother had previously helped advance this experimentation also as a subject. Powers uses these two points to show an enlightened child able to question the world with his own mother’s wisdom and a child’s directness before the impending doom.

Clinicians and theorists are rarely going to agree on what constitutes mental health. Is it the ability to function productively in hard conditions or is it more a matter of appropriate response? Constant cheerful optimism may not be the healthiest reaction… I had an awful thought, maybe the last few months of neural feedback were hurting Robin, in the face of the world’s basic brokenness more empathy meant deeper suffering, the question wasn’t why Robin was sliding down again, the question is why the rest of us were staying so insanely sanguine?

Powers’ father is a leading light in looking for life in exo-planets and through discussions with Robin introduces us to Fermi’s paradox and eventually to his son’s vision of the probable solution to this paradox:

At last he said “I think I might know where everybody is.”
It took me a while to remember the question he’d latched onto so long ago on a starry night in the Smokies, the Fermi paradox…
“Remember how you said there might be a big roadblock somewhere.”
“A great filter, that’s what we call it”.
“Like maybe there’s a great filter right at the beginning when molecules turn into living things or it might be when you first evolve a cell or when cells learn to come together or maybe the first brain.”
“Lots of bottlenecks”
“I was just thinking we’ve been looking and listening for sixty years.”
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
“I know but maybe the great filter isn’t behind us maybe it’s ahead of us.”
“And maybe we were just now hitting it, wild, violent and Godlike consciousness, lots and lots of consciousness, exponential and exploding consciousness leveraged up by machines and multiplied by the billions. Power too precarious to last long.”
“Because otherwise, how old did you say the universe is?”
“14 billion years.”
“Because otherwise they’d be here.”

Powers, through the pressure on the father’s project’s funding of the Seeker space telescope, presents to us a barely extrapolated vision of the fight for science against economic obscurantism in our times, illustrated by his thoughts following one of the President’s tweets:

“So called science should stop inventing facts and charging them to the American people….”
The Seeker was just another proxi-battle in the endless American civil war, our side claimed the discovery of earths would increase humanities collective wisdom and empathy, the presidents men said that wisdom and empathy were collectivist plots to crash our standard of living

This is, as always with Powers, an engaged piece of work. A well constructed story and a pessimistic vision of our ineluctable future. Empathy is the way forward but the human race is not capable of enough of this commodity. Robin’s condition is an allegory of the earth’s situation; as for Robin, in one generation since the Meadow’s report, the realisation of the effect of humans on the climate and on our present and future lives has gone from non existant to the centre of preoccupation and as for Robin’s condition politicians and scientists “want to prescribe three different medications”. An interesting read.

First Published in English as “Bewilderment” in 2021 by W. W. Norton and Company

Anuk Arudpragasam ‘A Passage North’

“Booker Prize 2021: 6 Books Shortlisted for this prize.
“A Passage North”: In order of reading book number 3.

Waking up each morning we follow by circuitous routes the thread of habit, out of our homes, into the world, and back to our beds at night, move unseeingly through familiar paths, one day giving way to another and one week to the next, so that when in the midst of this daydream something happens and the thread is finally cut, when, in a moment of strong desire or unexpected loss, the rhythms of life are interrupted, we look around and are quietly surprised to see that the world is vaster than we thought, as if we’d been tricked or cheated out of all that time, time that in retrospect appears to have contained nothing of substance, no change and no duration, time that has come and gone but left us somehow untouched.

A passage North is a carefully written introspective book, the opening quote gives an idea of this degree of thought, a great deal of emotion is present but mostly kept at a distance as Krishan is forced to reflect on his life both just before and during his passage north. We learn something of the magnitude of the war between the Tamil Tigers and government forces in the poverty stricken north of Sri Lanka where the Tiger’s were not just beaten but their very trace erased from the land leaving the people in a great state of trauma. Krishan was away from Sri Lanka in India during the war, somehow explaining away to himself what was happening there:

Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his initial reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war, as though he’d been hesitant to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor, violated, stateless people were the ones alleging it, as though he’d been unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the authority of a panel of foreign experts, legitimized by a documentary narrated by a clean-shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.

Whilst in India krishan had fallen in love with Anjum, an activist and their story had lasted on and off for several years.

After moving back to his home in Colombo, in the south of Sri Lanka, Krishan is given the opportunity to help his ailing grandmother by employing Rani, a woman from the north that had lost her husband and her son during the war, having Rani away from her home region seemed to be helping her. After news of her death Krishan learnt more about Rani’s life, about her electric scock treatment for trauma, and undertakes the long journey north by train where he is able to reflect on his own life.

This is a very different piece of writing to the other shortlisted books, caught between ancient and modern, violence and gentleness, the events are not yet first hand.

First Published in English as “A Passage North” in 2021 by Random House

Maggie Shipshead ‘Great Circle’

“Booker Prize 2021: 6 Books Shortlisted for this prize.
“Great Circle”: In order of reading book number 4.

In my blip of higher education, I had time to take Intro to Philosophy and learn about the panopticon, the hypothetical prison Jeremy Bentham came up with, where there would be one itty-bitty guardhouse at the center of a giant ring of cells. One guard was all you needed because he might be watching at any time, and the idea of being watched matters way more than actually being watched. Then Foucault turned the whole thing into a metaphor about how all you need to discipline and dominate a person or a population is to make them think it’s possible they’re being watched. You could tell the professor wanted us all to think the panopticon was scary and awful, but later, after Archangel made me way too famous, I wanted to take Katie McGee’s preposterous time machine back to that lecture hall and ask him to consider the opposite. Like instead of one guard in the middle, you’re in the middle, and thousands, maybe millions, of guards are watching you—or might be—all the time, no matter where you go.

This is a story about two timelines and two women with a number of things in common, of Marion Graves, the aviator, who dissapeared in 1950 during a round the world attempt passing by both poles and of the actrice chosen to play her role for a film of Marian’s life, Hadley Baxter. Hadley’s parents died in an aircrash when she was young and she was brought up by a Holywood uncle who between drinks and drugs had her taken to a number of castings from which she eventually becomes the young woman epitomised in the opening quote.
Hadley had read the lost logbook of marian in the library:

The lost log book of Marian Graves… It made a big impression on me when I was a kid orphan solidarity you know, team raised by uncles, i thought it would be full of hidden messages like tarot cards….
It’s the perfect sort of book for that isn’t it mostly cryptic bits and pieces what did it tell you? nothing…..really I’m most intrigued by the question of whether or not she intended it to be read at all. I think the fact that she left it behind at least meant that she couldn’t bear to destroy it.

Marian’s life is however the centre point of the book, from surviving a mysterious ship sinking on the atlantic with her twin brother Jamie during the first world war to being brought up, or left to bring herself up by a gambling and drinking uncle who was also a semi renowned painter in Missoula an out of the way town in Missouri where she made and kept, throughout her entire life, her childhood friend Caleb. How did she become an aviator? Well she passed by many steps, marrying a jealous bootlegger and then flying for him before changing her name and going into hiding to escape him:

He’s my friend, Marian said he’s always been my friend am I not allowed to have friends? Her voice rose, do you want me to be completely alone except for you? He sat down heavily the anger going out of him yes he said if I’m being honest
You want to know what we did we talked she gathered herself said as though making an accusation i told Caleb I loved you he looked up, you did when did you start having me followed say it again tell me what you told him he was radiating thrilled pleasure, she felt only hopelessness not now tell me you love me Louder she said When did you start having me followed when you flew to Vancouver only because I was so afraid of losing you…it was for your protection.

Marian becomes an aircraft ferry pilot during the second world war in England before the events around that ship sinking as she was an infant catches up with her. The question Hadley then asks herself and eventually solves is whether Marian really resembles the Marian in the film.

If the prize were to go to a traditional “story” then this book would be an excellent candidate.

First Published in english as “Great Circle” in 2021, by Doubleday

Rachel Cusk ‘Second Place’

“Booker Prize 2021: 6 Books Sure to be shortlisted for this prize.
“No One Is Talking About This”: In order of reading book number 5.

SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, whenever the headline was too perfect, the juxtaposition too good to be true.img_0238SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, when the Flat Earth Society announced it had members all over the globe.

I sometimes wondered what it must have been like to have your whole idea of what a story or novel is put in question, for instance for the pre-war audience to wake up to discover the Beat Generation “From William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique (the splicing of a document, rearranged to create new meaning), to Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness, the Beats forged new formats through their innovative and experimental approaches toward literature.” Well here I’m faced with writing shaped by the internet, short attention span paragraphs unlinked to each other but slowly forming a whole, a message in the first half of this book, here are a few:

The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.

A twenty-three-year-old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores whatsoever. “Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.

And after losing herself online, the narrator is faced with reality in the second part of this book, told in the same short sharp paragraphs which after seeming void, empty, vaguely humorous in the first part, in this second part they become a little more linked to each other, although rarely directly. This same approach becomes caring, alive, touching and human; quite some feat!
Reading the acknowledgements afterwards it seems this experience in the second part is based on Lockwoods own family, and hence her own life, there is then little doubt that the first part is also based on her life. I’ll let you discover this story, but here is a sounbite:

Dread rose in their hearts upon hearing the worst seven words in the English language. There was a new law in Ohio. It stated that it was a felony to induce a pregnant woman before thirty-seven weeks, no matter what had gone wrong, no matter how big her baby’s head was. Previously it had been a misdemeanor, a far less draconian charge. The law itself was only a month old: fresh as a newborn, and no one knew whose it was, and naked fear on the doctors’ faces.

This is experimental writing, and required me to hang in there in the first section, even if some of the paragraphs were mildly humorous. The narrator after sinking without trace into the portal is dragged out by real life, by emotions and later after the events of the second part we know she’ll be pulled towards it again but she will not fall in.

First Published in English as “No One Is Talking About This” in 2021 by Bloomsbury circus