Books of the Year 2023 / Part One
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose their favourite books of 2023. Part two follows next week.
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming is a portrait of Carel Fabritius, the Dutch painter whose reputation rests on the ‘The Goldfinch’ (a painting that formed the centrepiece of Donna Tart’s novel of the same name.) Fabritius died aged 32 in a massive explosion in the city of Delft in 1654 – the thunderclap of the title. But this is more than an art historical quest to find out who the mysterious Fabritius was. It’s a memoir of Cumming’s deep attachment to Dutch painting, instilled in her by her Scottish painter father.
Cumming, who’s the Observer’s art critic, previously wrote an intriguing narrative-led memoir of her mother’s childhood in On Chapel Sands. Thunderclap is more discursive. It’s a celebration of the golden age of Dutch painting, an exploration of Cumming’s chthonic relationship with Fabritius’s work, a tribute to her father’s art and an excavation of the exigencies of the artistic life, all woven together into a loose, digressive narrative that may wander but is always rigorously learned and refreshingly lucid. A real treat.
Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney is also a memoir about the author’s relationship with the American poet, novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney was a student in Hardwick’s creative writing class at Columbia in the early 1970s and maintained a close relationship with her until her death in 2007. I’m a fan of Hardwick’s – in particular her 1979 experimental novel Sleepless Nights, a pioneering work of autofiction long before it was even called that. Pinckney’s account is deliciously gossipy about the 20th century New York literary scene. It’s a name-droppers’ paradise – Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Barbara Epstein, and Lillian Hellman among many more – fight and rage and debate through these pages – and Pinckney’s diaristic style gives the book an informal immediacy as if it’s all just after happening.
By chance, after spending the summer reading Joyce’s Ulysses, the next book I picked up was Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. Some symmetries between these two works stood out for me. Separated by a century, one evoking a Dublin under colonial occupation, the other, Palestine, the books seemed to speak to each other.
Minor Detail concerns the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman by Israeli soldiers in 1949. A contemporary narrator emerges in the second part of the book. She is researching the story of the killing and the book is then about her attempts to move beyond her inner confinement, as well as negotiate the dangerous system of exclusion for Palestinians in the occupied territories.
In Minor Detail’s naming of places held under the oppression of occupation, the influence of Joyce seems apparent. A pre-1949 map of Palestine filters displacement history through the narrator’s road trip invoking a feeling of estrangement: ‘Khirbat al-Ammour, Bir Ma’in, al-Burj, Khirbat al-Buwayra, Beit Shanna, Salbit, al Qubab, al-Kanisa, Kharrouba, Khirbat Zakariyya, Bariyya, Dair Abu Salama, Al-Na’ani, Jindas, Hadatha, Abu al Fadl, Kisla, and many others… A very large park called Canada Park now extends over the area where all these villages used to be.’
Joyce’s Ulysses is famous for providing a detailed, true map of Dublin: ‘if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed from my book,’ Joyce wrote. As a Dubliner I found the evocation of Joyce’s city more visceral than intellectual. The naming of streets created an atmosphere so intimate to my mind’s eye it felt as though I might meet myself on the page, and not be surprised. For example, my grandparent’s attic flat may be glimpsed through Stephen Dedalus, standing on the steps of the National Library looking towards Kildare Street: ‘Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown.’
A sense of the sacredness of inhabitation is set off. The ancient notion of the hearth as the omphalos drawing smoke from the underworld to release to the skies is further evoked: ‘Laud we the gods / And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils / from our bless’d altars,’ Stephen recites from Shakespeare. And I see my granny kneeling down at her fireplace in Kildare Street, trying to get wet slag to take, in a dwelling torn down in the 1970s.
And of course, in that towering flaw of softness himself, Leopold Bloom, Joyce created the protagonist for modern humanity, filtering histories, languages, civilisations, through the inner consciousness of the outsider, the marginalised, dispossessed Jew.
At the end of Minor Detail an old woman briefly appears. The narrator steals glances at her, ‘at her hands, which she lets rest in her lap, on the fabric of her black dress, and they seem stronger than any hands I’ve seen in my life.’ Like the dead Bedouin girl, the mysterious sense of transience and permanence combining together is evoked in this old Palestinian woman who disappears into the landscape, and yet remains forever.
Two recently published books written by debut authors have resonated with me in the best possible way. I love writing with a strong sense of place where location is far more than setting in that the physical landscape is an affecting agent on the lives of the characters who inhabit it. For this reason, though falling into different genres, Gaynor Funnell’s Penbanc (non-fiction and unfolding in rural north-Pembrokeshire) and Joshua Jones’ Local Fires (short fiction and set firmly in urban Llanelli in south-west Wales) ticked all the right boxes.
It seems apt therefore that I bring Wales’ much-missed poet and psychogeographer, Nigel Jenkins, into this discussion as Funnell was the recipient of Swansea University’s Creative non-fiction award for 2022 set up in his memory, and Jones’ references psychogeography as a way into writing fiction in the interview contained in Local Fires.
Jenkins urged the would-be effective writer, whom he termed, a ‘worker of the word’ in ‘Advice to a Young Poet’ to get to ‘know [your] place’ close up and personal before putting pen to paper. It seems these two relatively new writers have heeded this advice, walking their ‘milltir sgwar’ forensically and allowing the multiple layers of place to be peeled back and the memories held within to seep through the pores of their skin. Place is the very DNA of both these works.
Contemplative. Meditative. Informative. Funnell’s Penbanc is all this. Walking slowly though the seasons across her patch of land in north Pembrokeshire, she succeeds in creating a deep map that illustrates the intersection of geography, history, myth, magic and her own personal and brave emotional responses to what she encounters as she navigates love, loss and Lockdown. I found it to be a deeply affecting and intimate meditation.
Jones’ interconnected short-stories in Local Fires employ the names of real landmarks to stake out his territory: the post-industrial landscape of Llanelli. He introduces the reader to a wide cast of characters (e.g. a talent show hopeful, a recovering alcoholic, a teenager newly diagnosed as Autistic, a woman on the day of her fourth marriage) to reveal the human struggle and how most just about manage to deal with life’s aftermaths, bitter disappointments and losses. I found this writing to be innovative and illustrative of the flexibility of the short story genre which is open to so many forms.
At the time of writing I am so looking forward to listening to Gaynor Funnell at the launch of Penbanc on Saturday, 9th of December at Swansea HQ Urban Kitchen, and to have the privilege of chatting to Joshua Jones about identity, place, personal motivations and his crafting of prose at the Swansea launch of Local Fires.
Amongst much that has been enjoyable, I’ve read two books this year that have also been, in their different ways, revelatory for me. And in both, humour has been the key.
Greek mythology has always been something that I’ve felt I ought to know about, but has remained strangely elusive, never really come to life for me. Reading Stone Blind, the retelling of the story of Medusa by Natalie Haynes, brought what had been for me dry, distant and monochrome tales to vibrant life. So many times, as I turned the pages, I had ‘aha!’ moments. Haynes is a comedian as well as a classicist, and making me laugh helped me to understand, at last, what these entanglements of Gods and Mortals have to say to us today.
Last summer I was browsing in an independent bookshop and, feeling I should buy something, picked up The Trees. I knew nothing about it, other than that it had been shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2022. I had never heard of its author, Percival Everett. Was he, I wondered, another wunderkind risen to early glory? I was shocked and not a little ashamed to discover that he was the author of nearly thirty novels. But also relieved that this was not a heavily-promoted debut from a young author plucked from a promising career in publishing. And then delighted to find it was funny. But it turns out that the subject of the book is not funny, not one tiny bit. One minute you’re laughing, then the smile is wiped off your face as you realise what this novel is really about. And then you’re laughing again; there’s wonderfully sharp dialogue in this novel. How clever of Everett to use humour to pull unsuspecting readers in to a topic they might otherwise avoid or think forbiddingly dark – the history of lynching in the American Deep South. It’s a stunning read.
Dad, You’ve Got Dementia by Kristen Phillips
My friend, Kristen Phillips, has written a beautiful and hopeful book about dementia. It’s full of insight and compassion, an important resource for people with the condition and for those caring for them, as well as a moving and poetic tribute to her dad, Don; a testament to their wonderfully close relationship and love for each other.
Before Don was diagnosed with dementia, conversations had already begun to go in circles. Kristen tried different ways to get her dad back and connect with him – not the dad who could recall what was said or retain facts about his family, but the one who was patient, curious and funny. She used Penny Garner’s SPECAL method, which treats dementia as a disability, putting someone with dementia first, understanding their condition from their point of view.
Kristen is an accomplished poet and realised the words Don was finding in their conversations were often expressed together like poetry. She began writing them down.
I love this transcript of Kristen speaking from London to Don in his care-home in New Zealand:
‘You’re loved from London.
Oh, that’s nice to hear.
Love you, love you, love you.
Appreciate that love.
You’re still your wonderful self.’
Kristen honours Don’s words throughout the book. They cut through with remarkable clarity and truth, wisdom and self-awareness: ‘I can’t always secure the things I want to say,’ ‘the things I remember I can’t recall’, ‘about the sad state of the world, I’m old enough not to be bound up in what I’m doing here – it comes and goes.’
Charity Norman, author of Remember Me describes Kristen’s book perfectly:
‘Lyrical, honest, unfailingly loving: a portrait of the power of connection, even when there are no more words.’
I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I am a big re-reader of books and among the many books I read again and again is Bleak House so I am always in the market for a new novel set in the nineteenth century with a cast of thousands! This year I found that in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. Set during the period of the cause celebre that was the case of the Tichborne claimant, this story focusing on the imagined household of the prolific hack novelist William Harrison Ainsworth brilliantly captures the atmosphere of a society caught in the grip of both media and political manipulation. In a situation where everybody, ‘high and low’ is taking a side either in the packed courtroom, the adjoining clubs and taverns or through the daily papers, can the chief protagonist Mrs Touchet remain an impartial observer of the madness and the keeper of her own secrets? Meanwhile Andrew Ogle a former enslaved man from one of the Tichborne plantations wrestles with his own and the Tichborne secrets. As well as being a great read with its depiction of Victorian society and its literary life, one of the most striking features of the novel and the one that perhaps speaks most to us is the examination of how quickly and virulently conspiracy theories can multiply, and how in the face of overwhelming evidence (spoiler: the Tichborne claimant was a fraud!) to the contrary, we can still cling on to what we want to believe. And lurking in the background to all this one Charles Dickens, a former acquaintance of Mrs Tuchet’s and an early admirer of the increasingly pathetic Ainsworth. The Fraud is satisfyingly Dickensian in its scope and concerns.
I bought So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan just a few months ago. I was treating myself, like buying a piece of jewellery, to the small hard back book of just forty-seven pages. I read it quickly, eager to lap it up but I was taken aback by the visceral effect it had on me. It is the story of an Irish man and a French woman, Cathal and Sabine, who work in Dublin but decide to live together in the countryside in Cathal’s house. I read it again as the author suggests and then again to fully understand the beauty of the sentences, its pacing and the myriad of emotions and human complexities in the relationship of these two young people.
This is a difficult read as tensions are obvious from the beginning, suggested by images of a shadow crossing the sun in the first page, or ‘the sky was blank and blue’. It’s a story of how a young man can have severe misogynistic attitudes towards women, that are also damaging to himself. How he continues to live his life in denial and concealment even when he has met a woman who offers him a chance to grow.
The significance of ‘Friday, July 29th’ in the first line of the story is only revealed in the last line of the last page. What lies between these two pages is an extraordinary insight into how a simple lack of generosity between a man and a woman can pull them apart.
Photo by John Lavin