Tag: historical fiction

Adult, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: THE FAMILIAR by LEIGH BARDUGO

The Familiar is a novel about people who want: want what they can’t have, want too much, want the wrong thing or the wrong person, want at the cost of something or someone else. It’s a novel that explores what it is to want, that looks at wanting in its many inflections: longing, desire, lust, greed, gluttony, hunger. And there is much to be sought after in The Familiar, whether material (food, dresses, comfortable beds, big houses) or not (power, agency, freedom, love). Every character in The Familiar desperately and viscerally wants something, and what drives the novel’s story is what they’re willing to do to get what (or who) they want.

But the matter of wanting very quickly transmutes into the matter of who gets to want in the first place, and who deserves to get what they want. Our main character, Luzia, has lived her whole life feeling lesser than, told to hide her magic and her Jewish heritage. Her desire for a comfortable and luxurious life feels, to her, as though she is overreaching. Who is she to stray so far from what life has allotted for her? Who is she to want more than the existence she is eking out as a scullion for a careless and oftentimes cruel employer? On the flip side, we have the powerful men she is surrounded with, men who can conceive of no limit to what they want. Men who collect people as they collect things. The world is theirs for the taking; all they have to do is to go out and take it.

Where does desire end and greed begin? When does wanting become wanting too much? These questions carry over well to a novel that’s also grappling with the (very) tenuous line between faith and heresy, miracles and magic. And it’s a line with devastating consequences: in an age of the Spanish Inquisition, any hint of heresy or “demonic” influence could possibly get you executed. Luzia is caught in the middle of all of this: she wants a life better than the one she would’ve ever had as a scullion, and yet the way to get to that life is through magic that could potentially be viewed as “demonic” or heretical. She is trying to take agency of her life, to actively work towards something greater, and yet she is caught up in the dangerous web of power and manipulation of the men around her, all of whom of course have their own motives and desires.

Set during the Spanish Golden age, The Familiar is also very much grounded in a particular historical time and its attendant politics, laws, codes of conduct, etc. But as historically grounded as it is, it’s also a novel that feels really timeless, one whose themes transcend its historical context–and one whose timelessness feels all the more fitting given that it’s inspired by fairytales and is, itself, a kind of fairytale. Everyone knows what it is to want something, no matter how big or small, and The Familiar is such a sympathetic and vital account of a woman with this bone-deep craving for more that she cannot let go of. And throughout it all, Bardugo’s writing is so perfectly suited to this story: it just sweeps you up, vivid and enchanting even as it jolts you to the violent realities of its world.

In the writing as in the narrative, The Familiar has all the enchantment of a fairytale, with all the grit and bite of a story that sees the true cost of the fairytale story.

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Adult, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: THE FRAUD by ZADIE SMITH

The last thing I want to feel about a 464-page novel after I finish it is lukewarm. Sadly, though, that was my general impression of Zadie Smith’s latest offering.

Before I begin, it helps to know that The Fraud is comprised of three main storylines: the story of Eliza Touchet, a widow, and her life with her cousin-by-marriage and writer William Ainsworth; the Tichborne trial, a wildly popular case wherein a man claimed that he was, in fact, the long presumed-dead baronet Sir Roger Tichborne; and the story of the life of Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved man who was one of the witnesses in the Tichborne trial.

With that in mind, I’ll start with the positives: Smith’s writing is great, and I generally enjoyed Eliza as a protagonist. At almost 70 years old, her education and life experiences make her a compelling point-of-view to follow, especially when it comes to some of the themes that the novel is trying to explore: freedom, justice, activism, love. Eliza is strongly on the side of abolitionism, having spent many years attending meetings and consuming resources on the matter; that she is an ally to and proponent of this cause is something she takes to be a key part of herself and her values. And yet, in several key scenes throughout the novel, Smith deftly unsettles this simple narrative that Eliza has built for herself: moments of tension, of discomfort, where Eliza doesn’t quite live up to her ideals, where she is distinctly confronted and unsettled by her privilege (particularly her class and racial privilege).

So much for the positives; the negatives, on the other hand, I have a lot more to say about. I started off by saying that The Fraud is comprised of three storylines because this is, in my view, one of its fundamental problems as a novel: though technically connected, the storylines are disparate, and none of them feel like they particularly go anywhere. Each of these narratives feels like it exists discretely of the others: the Eliza-and-William storyline mostly consists of meetings with the famous literary men of the time (Dickens, Thackeray, etc.); the Tichborne storyline is, of course, focused on the trial itself; and the Bogle storyline is a separate chunk introduced halfway through into the book and then concluded about 70 pages later. The Eliza parts and the trial parts alternate, seemingly without rhyme or reason, so that you go from one chapter set in the present timeline during the Tichborne trial only to be thrust into a chapter set 20 years earlier where Eliza and William are hosting some random dinner, visiting someone, talking about something, etc. The whole structure of the novel feels confused, its story so sorely lacking cohesion that I felt like I was reading 3 separate books rather than one novel.

Another issue is that The Fraud has zero narrative momentum. At 464 pages, it is a longer novel, and as a longer novel, it is all the more important for it to be able to keep the narrative moving, to sustain interest for the entire course of its story–and this was just not the case here. With the exception of the Tichborne trial story, most of the novel’s story is just…told to us: the Eliza storyline and the Bogle storyline are both in the past, both stories that have already happened and that are simply being recollected by their respective narrators. And I am just not the kind of reader who likes this style of storytelling: I would much rather read about the characters living through something than them telling me about something that they’ve already lived through. On top of this, the novel’s chapters are so short that it makes it virtually impossible to be immersed in these recollected narratives: most chapters are only a couple of pages long, and most of them follow a discrete event (a dinner, a visit, a walk, a conversation) rather than carrying over events from the previous chapter(s). The storytelling just altogether feels too sequential: this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and then here I am. It’s too inert, not dynamic enough, lacking climactic moments, drama, narrative intrigue.

Lastly, though The Fraud is clearly a heavily researched novel, it is also one whose research overtakes its narrative. More often than not, the research doesn’t enrich or enliven the story so much as pad it out. There is just so much information in this novel, and in the absence of some kind of propulsive force to keep the narrative moving, it makes the novel feel bloated: it gets tiring, after a while, to keep track of so many names and places and histories and events.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that “tiring” is exactly the right word to characterize my experience of reading The Fraud. It’s a novel that asks an investment of its reader that it does not reward that reader for: after the many pages of storylines, even after following so many characters over so many years and so many changes and so many places, it somehow feels like nothing really happens in this book. I picked it up; I read it; I finished it. Did I love it? No. Did I like it? Not really. It was just a book that I read–and for a book that is this long, that is this expansive, that is grappling with such interesting themes and such a rich historical period, that is just extremely disappointing.

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Adult, Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: LEARNED BY HEART by EMMA DONOGHUE

“You won’t be surprised that I so treasure these old haunts. It was in York that I received my education; where I was stamped like warm wax by a seal, formed once and for all. I know you’ll recall the song—where all the joy and mirth, made this town heaven on earth. At the Manor School, I tasted heaven on earth even as I toiled to pack my poor skull with the knowledge and wisdom I was told I’d need for life. The joke is, Lister, the only lesson I learned, or at least the only lesson I remember, was you.”

Learned by Heart is classic Emma Donoghue: detailed, understated, finely drawn, poignant. It’s a quiet, slice-of-life story, one that takes as its focus a group of fourteen-year-old girls in an English boarding school called Manor School in 1805. With a deft hand, Donoghue brings this setting and its inhabitants to life: the friendships, the gossip, the drama, the antics, the games, the teachers, the classes. Boarding schools are already such interesting literary settings, and Learned by Heart‘s is no less interesting. Throughout the novel, you get a strong sense of how the boarding school functions as a microcosm, a kind of world unto itself that is, at the same time, very much subject to the world outside it. What is especially compelling about Manor School, too, is the way Donoghue depicts the tension between the nineteenth-century boarding school as a formative space but also as a distinctly temporary one. The girls understand that they are in this school to be “finished,” supplied with the skills and accomplishments they will need to eventually find husbands. So, in one way, the school is a means to an end, a bubble outside the “real world”–and yet in another way, it very much is these girls’ world, the place where they are growing up, spending the most formative years of their lives. Needless to say, I found Donoghue’s exploration of the boarding school as a setting to be fascinating, and I just loved the way she wrote about girlhood and adolescence in the nineteenth century, a time when the world seems to be opening up to these girls–when they’re becoming alive to new possibilities, relationships, ways of thinking–and yet at the same time slowly closing in on them, pushing them towards that seemingly inevitable endpoint of marriage.

“Left alone in the courtyard, Eliza finds herself thinking again that school is not a rehearsal for life’s play. Not for Hetty, nor for Eliza and Lister, nor any of them. It’s the first act of the piece, performed once only. It comes to Eliza that she’ll be reliving these brief days for the rest of her life.”

Setting aside, I was also drawn in by the characters of this novel, the two main ones being Eliza Raine, our narrator, who is the biracial daughter of a white English father and an Indian mother; and Anne Lister, who is a new arrival at Manor School, and who later starts up a relationship with Eliza. Just as Donoghue’s sharp, detailed writing brings to life the novel’s setting, so, too, does it bring to life her characters. I was especially moved by Eliza, whose loneliness in the face of her position is so keenly felt throughout the novel: her father dead, with only vague childhood memories of the mother she was forced to leave behind in India, and no family except for a sister who is cold to, and distant from, her. To be sure, it’s a lot for a fourteen-year-old to handle, which is why it’s so interesting when Lister arrives at the school and starts up a friendship, and later a romance, with Eliza. In Lister, Eliza finds a person she can confide in, someone who gives her the space to talk about the things she has previously found unthinkable to articulate, and, slowly, someone she grows to love deeply. The relationship between these two–first platonic, then romantic–is tender and poignant, the care and affection they have for each other so clear, and the ways they complement each other always engaging to watch unfold. And of course, Lister is no flat, boring love interest: she is bold and candid and insatiably curious, full of vigour and just the kind of person to shake up this group of girls with her arrival at Manor School.

So far I’ve talked about setting and character, but one last thing I want to mention is this novel’s form. Structurally, Learned by Heart is a clever novel in that in between the slice-of-life sections set in 1805 and 1806 at the boarding school, we get these letters that Eliza is writing to Lister in 1815, some 10 years later. Little by little, we’re able to glean information about Eliza from these (relatively brief) letters: what happened to her relationship with Lister, where she is now, how she’s doing, and, of course, why she’s writing these letters in the first place. I wanted to mention these letters in particular because they struck me as not just narratively effective, but also very moving, each letter a searing window into Eliza’s shifting moods–whether she is melancholy, manic, bitter, resigned–a kind of thermometer of her state of mind at that particular point in time.

Learned by Heart is a meticulously researched novel, all the more impressive because it’s a novel where research is not a substitute for narrative, but rather something that enriches and animates it, makes it more specific and so more vivid. I really loved this book–it broke my tiny lil heart–and I can’t wait for more historical fiction from Emma Donoghue.

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