A Tiler’s Afternoon – Lars Gustafsson (tr. Tom Geddes)

X (erstwhile Twitter) might be a ghastly place nowadays, but it continues to remain a great source of book recommendations (for me at least), and thanks to Andrew Male (who writes wonderfully about music, books, films, TV) I discovered Lars Gustafsson.

It’s strange, Torsten said to himself, that I’m having so many peculiar thoughts today. Some really unpleasant, and some rather nice ones.

Things are coming back to me that I haven’t thought of for years.

It’s as if this strange house had some kind of influence on how you think.

These paragraphs convey the essence of Lars Gustafsson’s marvellous novella A Tiler’s Afternoon, a strange, hypnotic, existential tale exploring loss, the power of memories, the meaning of work, and the mysteries of life, that as the title suggests captures one working day in the life of an ageing, lonely tiler.

On a grey November morning in 1982, we meet Torsten Bergman, the tiler of the title and our protagonist, aged 65 and living alone in Uppsala, Sweden. Torsten appears to be a man at the end of this tether, and the neglected appearance of his house and garden pretty much mirror his own wretched state (“The entire garden a littered, jumbled monument to the collected works of his whole life. Or, as some might have put it, the failures”). This crumbling garden is also a symbol of the twin tragedies in Torsten’s life captured in one fell swoop – his wife Britta is dead (“There was no need for flower-beds now, when you didn’t have a wife”), while a lawn mower bought in the year his child was born, now abandoned in the corner of the garden, in a way conveys the son’s absence from Torsten’s life.

But then one Thursday morning, the piercing shrill of the telephone sets the stage for the unravelling of a puzzling, disconcerting set of events. Woken from the depths of his slumber, Torsten struggles to place the caller at the other end of the line, but when the Finnish accent finally registers in his addled brain, so does the identity of the caller. It turns out to be a man called Pentti, a plumber and a jack of all trades, who has worked with Torsten in the past and has come across a work opportunity for him at a big, old-fashioned, suburban house. It appears that the previous tilers had done a rather haphazard job retiling the bathroom and kitchen, and the owners are looking for a reliable tiler who will do the work well. Pentti has no clue about the identity of the owners, although he is quick to assure Torsten, that these are not the type of people to take loans and then squander the money on drinks and other frivolous pleasures.

Nursing a bad headache and a chronic stomach sickness, Torsten scribbles the address on a piece of paper and gears himself up with great difficulty to begin his day, a day that will transform into something odd and undefinable, although he is not to know it at the time. When Torsten lands up at the house that is to be his workplace, he is impressed by its stylishness and ambitious planning. But there’s not a soul to be found, no one to give him orders and explain what is expected of him in terms of the work involved. As Torsten begins to wander through this peculiar house and its empty rooms, he comes to the bathroom and is appalled by the shoddy tiling work left unfinished. Before him, a battery of tilers appeared to have worked on laying tiles, the quality of work significantly deteriorating with each successive tiler.

Priding himself on his resourcefulness, Torsten gets to work despite the lack of instructions – he takes it upon himself to break the badly laid tiles and redo everything with precision and quality. Luckily, new tiles are already there, but what he desperately needs are materials and the money to buy them. Chancing upon the expensive array of taps, an idea takes hold of him – why not sell these taps and with the money buy the materials? If he has to get going, something needs to be done, and with no one around to tell him what to do, he is going to have to think for himself.

As the day unfolds, and Torsten is contentedly immersed in his tiling work, he begins to daydream about the mysterious Sophie K who has a room on the top floor with her name displayed on the door but whom Torsten hasn’t yet met. In one dream, Sophie K is an attractive red-haired woman who warns him of the owners he is working for; they could be drug dealers. In another iteration of the dream, Sophie K is a withered, old woman who resembles his own Aunt Sophie from his childhood, which immediately sets off a stream of memories flooding his mind related to his childhood and youth.

As a serious child and often sick, we learn of Torsten being bullied at school, we learn of his religious mother and his strict upbringing, his developing passion for photography and science, cameras and crystal wireless sets, objects that displease his mother. Memories of his young love, Irene, resurface from the recesses of his mind, a woman who disappears from his life as suddenly as she appears and symbolizes a world and class, utterly different from his.

As the day progresses, the continuing absence of the house owners begins to disturb Torsten, but at the same time, he also derives considerable pleasure from his work, confident of his skill and mastery when it comes to tiling. These quiet hours see him absorbed in his job, while flashbacks of various periods in his life flit before him.

When he bumps into another friend Stiggsy while buying materials, Torsten invites him to help while also enjoy some camaraderie over drinks and food in this lonely, abandoned house. If Torsten is a serious, reserved man, Stiggsy is a kind of counterfoil to his personality; Stiggsy has led a colourful life dabbling in various businesses and even becoming a preacher one time, a lively and often comic raconteur whose stories make Torsten wonder whether Stiggsy is telling the truth or fabricating lies.

But as the clock ticks away, when some strange discoveries are made and odd callers come knocking at the door, even Stiggsy begins to get unnerved by the mysterious quality of the house, the sense of unease beginning to rub off on Torsten too.

By turns quiet, understated, and unsettling, A Tiler’s Afternoon, then, is a meditation on the meaning of life and work, where the ordinariness of the everyday reveals concepts that are far more profound and universal. It is a novella suffused with nuggets of wisdom and insights into human nature, particularly in the way it charts the entire life of our protagonist within these slim pages.

Gustafsson excels at transforming seemingly unremarkable surroundings and objects into piercing reflections on the meaning of our existence in this world. For instance, the pungent scent of rotting leaves and the sluggish yellow river evokes “the raw scent of time itself” as Torsten ruminates on its peculiar quality of going too fast or too slow; the messy tiling work left unfinished at the house for Torsten is a metaphor for the deteriorating quality of life itself (“Was there any life of which you could say that it improved as time went on? Didn’t the bad habits get worse, the compromises more fudged, the inconsistencies greater?”); snowy winters evoke memories of his time with Irene and reveal class differences and a window into a forbidden world where Torsten is unwelcome, all captured in the space of a sentence; plants and flowers growing either on a luxurious garden bed or a cracked asphalt motorway symbolise not only the randomness of human life but also a feverish hope for something better irrespective of the circumstances.

Life doesn’t seem to serve our purposes, that much is obvious. We take it as we find it and make of it what we can. But the fact that we exist, that we are here, happens long before we know what to do with it. That’s the whole problem: that we haven’t asked for it. And then have to think of something to do with it.

Torsten’s complex personality unfurling is also fascinating to watch. Beset by loss and ill health, and a gradually deteriorating body and mind, Torsten’s reminisces depict a conflicted man striving for order in his work amid an otherwise chaotic personal life. More than anything, Torsten realises that the moral principles of abstinence and a structured way of living instilled in him in his childhood and youth are utterly worthless on entering adulthood when life’s burdens begin to take a toll on him. This contradictory behaviour is particularly palpable in his attitude towards alcohol – Torsten considers himself a teetotaler by heart while drinking heavily in reality as life begins to get increasingly unbearable…

Drunkenness was a form of worthlessness and disorder. But above all it was something that others fell into.

He himself used aquavit to achieve an order of a higher kind. An inner feeling of the meaningfulness of the world, you could perhaps say. For years he’d found it hard to get any sensible work done at all if he didn’t have a few swigs at lunchtime or just after, but at the time he detested his friends drinking on the job. That was self-contradictory, of course, and he realised it. But he had a strong feeling that the world had to be contradictory to be able to function. That was quite simply the way it was created. And no other world than that was imaginable, with all its contradictions.

In a day filled with weird encounters and inexplicable occurrences, the sense of irony is not lost on Torsten and the reader – that the tiling work that gave Torsten an anchor, and a sense of purpose and meaning, might turn out to be meaningless after all.

By now he was a long way from sense and reason and balance. He had a feeling of not belonging anywhere, of having nowhere to go, and that the only thing connecting him to the world was this bizarre, meaningless work.

The magnetic pull of memories is also wonderfully rendered here, apt for a man who derives joy from clicking pictures; the wondrous nature of photographic images gradually emerging from the depths of the black liquid in a darkroom shaping themselves into symbols of long-forgotten memories gradually revealing themselves to him.  

Why had he gone in for photography so much as a boy? Was it his pleasure in the mysterious, the picture that emerged from the developing liquid? Or was it the fact that you could hold on to a picture? And sort of fish it back up out of time, that sluggish brown river of pictures and voices that disappeared?

A Tiler’s Afternoon is also not short on striking imagery of the kind we see for instance when Torsten, staunchly abstaining from alcohol for much of his youth finds the first sip to be an astonishing revelation…

He could never have imagined that anything so wonderful actually existed! It was, it seemed to him, as if you’d lived all your life in a little one-roomed flat and one day discovered that there was a huge room (light and welcoming, with big windows in all four walls, and billowing curtains and birdsong outside) hidden behind a wallpapered door.

It’s a book where sadness and absurdity seamlessly co-exist, particularly encapsulated in this conversation between Torsten and Stiggsy that is so revealing and heartbreaking and at the same time also bizarre:

“But first I had to lose the boy, of course. He was a good, decent boy: I had great hopes for him. But then he had to get in with those characters with their motorbikes. And things happened as they did.”

“Dreadful,” said Stig.

“Yes, it was dreadful. The wife was never the same again after that. She sort of lost herself. She’d go around doing her chores as before. But she wasn’t really there. Do you understand what I mean?”

“You can lose yourself. I’ve seen other people do it.”

“It became extremely peculiar after a while. It was a bit like talking to a goldfish.”

“Did you know that you can’t have goldfish together with other fish in an aquarium?”

Bleak and haunting with its masterful interplay of melancholia and wry humour, A Tiler’s Afternoon is a powerful little gem, one that is sure to find a place on my year-end list.

Triple Choice Tuesday on ‘Reading Matters’- My Selections

I have been following Kim’s wonderful blog ‘Reading Matters’ for many years now. So when she kindly invited me to participate in Triple Choice Tuesday, I jumped at the chance. Why not head over to her blog to check out the three books I have selected? Click here.

Image Source: Reading Matters (https://readingmattersblog.com/)

One Afternoon – Siân James

In the recently concluded Persephone Festival held in April, novelist Rachel Joyce discussed how One Afternoon by Siân James was one of her favourite Persephone books. I’ve yet to listen to the recording (must do so soon!), but can see why she loved this charming, understated novel…

One Afternoon by Siân James is a beautifully written, perceptive tale of love in all its avatars, relationships, making bold choices, and family. At its core is a love story, but Siân James’s intelligent writing ensures that the book never ventures into overtly sentimental territory.

The ‘one afternoon’ of the title refers to that one unexpected encounter that alters our protagonist Anna’s life forever. On that particular afternoon, Anna accidentally bumps into Charlie, a theatre actor who sweeps her off her feet and the two embark on a whirlwind affair. Anna, we soon learn, is a young widow with three daughters living in the countryside in a sumptuously decorated home she has grown to love. She was married to Giles, Director of the very theatre company where Charles works, and was considerably senior to her. We are told of how he died suddenly, but Anna gradually learns to move on. Meanwhile, in the present, her daughters, delightfully, welcome this new man in their mother’s life; Charlie equally gels well with them, participating in the family activities including horse riding et al, adding much mayhem and colour to their hitherto quiet routines.

But Charlie has his career to focus on which entails travelling to London often, and a possibly new opportunity that would involve long stretches of time in the city, away from Anna, soon beckons. This looming absence hangs like a Damocles sword over Anna who despairs at not being able to see Charlie, and niggling uncertainties about their future and a twangs of jealousy begin to creep in.

Intertwined with the present is Anna’s past as she reflects on her marriage to Giles, and their life together. Anna first meets Giles at a party at a young age when she is just a university student, but she is frustrated in her studies and feels adrift. Giles, successful and well-to-do at the time, persuades Anna to give up her education and become his wife instead, to which she agrees. We are told that Anna was happily married to Giles, but there’s a sense that theirs was more of a polite marriage further exacerbated by Giles’ posh upbringing and the age difference between them.

“However, Giles worked until he’d got everything exactly as he wanted it, including all the furniture. By this time I realise what a marvellous job he did; I’ve never wanted to alter a thing, not even a picture or ornament.

When all the work was finished, he completely lost interest in the house. I could tell that he was surprised by this, but with my vast childhood experience of playing house, I wasn’t at all. The joy was always in planning the rooms, arranging the furniture, finding the right boxes for table and chairs, searching out the kettle, the teapot and the ubiquitous jam jars. Once that was done, the game was deadly dull.”

Her sparkling relationship with Charlie makes Anna realise for the first time how spontaneity was sorely missing in her marriage to Giles. Anna is struck by how little she actually knew about Giles, he had his secrets of which she had nary a clue, and as the skeletons in his closet come tumbling out after his death, Anna is at first disconcerted by these revelations forcing her to view Giles and their marriage in a different light. Charlie, meanwhile, sensing Anna’s preoccupied state of mind, and unsure of his standing, decides to end their affair. Anna stoically takes this upheaval in her stride (she never expected anything serious out of it anyway), although she deeply misses Charlie. Then a crucial development occurs, Anna makes a radical (in that period) decision that challenges the conventional mores of her time, but also highlights a noticeable shift in societal attitudes and perceptions based on the various conversations she has with those close to her.

Thrown into this mix are some more characters and mini storylines that add meat to the novel – Anna’s parents and the tragic essence of their marriage, Giles’ mother (Anna’s mother-in-law) with whom she gets along surprisingly well, and last but not the least the stodgy village doctor with a tragic air about him who has taken a fancy to Anna but is despondent on learning that her heart is with Charlie.

One Afternoon, then, is an intelligent, lovely novel about marriage, new relationships, fresh beginnings and big change, finding your feet, and challenging conventional societal mores. More specifically, it is an exploration of love in its various forms whether romantic, marital, casual, maternal, or filial. The contrast between her marriage to Giles and her affair with Charlie compels Anna to ruminate on sex and love and what she missed in her marriage and what she desires in her future relationships. The easy, loving relationship between Anna and her daughters is superbly depicted – their frank conversations and varied personalities and yet how close-knit they are as a family.

To be honest, there’s nothing particularly appealing about any of the men portrayed here, but the highlight of the book for me was the voice – there’s a charming openness to Anna’s personality as she narrates her story with such refreshing candour. We glimpse her journey towards self-discovery and living life on her own terms as she transforms from a tentative, young wife to a confident, mature woman.

With a gamut of emotions – exhilaration, sadness, heartbreak, and quiet joy – infused in the narrative, there is much wit, wisdom, and subtlety in Siân James’ writing and storytelling that makes One Afternoon well worth reading.

Two Months of Reading – March & April 2024

March and April were hectic months for me – I travelled to Kashmir with family and was also quite busy setting up our new home and getting it ready to shift soon.  As a result, my reading and blogging have been a bit patchy – in between bouts of reading consistently, there were days when I didn’t read a single page. But I did read some stellar books during these two months. Of these, two were part of Kim’s #NYRBWomen24 reading project and they were very good, while the rest were a mix of translated literature, short stories, and 20^th-century literature written by women.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the nine books…You can read the detailed reviews on the first eight by clicking on the title links, with a review on the Moore to follow soon.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF KATZUO NAKAMATSU by Augusto Higa Oshiro (Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue)

Laden with poetic despair and immersed in a sea of swirling sentences, Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu is an elusive, enigmatic, and intense tale of death, madness, isolation, and identity; a brilliant walking novel drenched in dreamlike vibes as it evocatively captures the pulse of Lima, its myriad sights and sounds, making it a deeply haunting reading experience.

We meet Katzuo Nakamatsu on the very first page standing on a pebbled path one August evening mesmerised by the magnificence of the sakura blossoms. If this conveys an aura of peace and tranquility, then it proves short-lived, because Katzuo is immediately gripped by an unnamable anguish, “the weight of consciousness, unseeing affliction.”

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu is replete with an array of sights, sounds, and rich imagery lending the novel a very tonal and visual quality that only enhances its strange beauty. The lyrical, labyrinthine, looping sentences not only convey the complex pathways of Katzuo’s disturbed mind but also the contours of the city on his walking jaunts – a place of contrasts alternating between sumptuous gardens, hypnotic beaches, quiet affluent neighbourhoods on one side, and the squalid, forbidden corners depicting degradation and filth on the other.

A CRACK IN THE WALL by Claudia Piñeiro (Translated from Spanish by Miranda France)

I love how Claudia Piñeiro employs the framework of crime to explore relationships and social issues, and in this aspect, A Crack in the Wall is no different; it’s another excellent tale of cowardice, ruthless ambition, moral ambiguity, deception, and precarious relationships.

The novel opens with an image of our protagonist Pablo Simó, sitting at his desk “drawing the outline of a building that will never exist.” Pablo works as an architect in the offices of Borla and Associates, a firm engaged in construction and real estate. Borla, a greedy, ambitious man willing to cut corners, is at the helm of things ably helped by his secretary Marta Horvat (with whom he’s having an affair), a beautiful woman Pablo secretly desires. Pablo has worked for Borla for more than a decade but there’s a sense that both Marta and Borla don’t treat him as an equal, and Pablo seems to have resignedly accepted this. The monotony of his days is not lost on Pablo until a stranger walks into their offices one evening deeply disturbing their fragile sense of calm, and evoking deeply hidden memories of a crime committed in the past. In this novel, Piñeiro’s superb storytelling skills are on full display as she artfully combines the finer elements of plot development with astute character portraits that make for an utterly riveting narrative.

QUARTET IN AUTUMN by Barbara Pym

Quartet in Autumn was Barbara Pym’s penultimate novel published before her death and in terms of tone and subject matter, it’s a different book because of its haunting, sorrowful quality quite unlike her earlier works which displayed her masterful comic flourishes to full effect. And yet it is a lovely, restrained, poignant novel on the heartaches of growing old, deepening loneliness, the sense of emptiness felt post retirement, and unconventional friendships. 

We first meet Edwin, Norman, Letty, and Marcia working in a nondescript London office where they are placed in a common room. The nature of their work seems nebulous, we aren’t exactly sure what they do, maybe they are clerks? But this vagueness is deliberate and gives a flavour of the heightened loneliness of these characters particularly when the spectre of retirement begins to flash before them as they are gripped with a feeling of life passing by and a gnawing sense of emptiness. The comedy we are so used to in earlier Pym novels is muted though not absent, and despite its melancholic mood, the ending can be construed as hopeful. I loved it!

A DARK CORNER by Celia Dale  

Based on the one Celia Dale novel I’ve read so far (the superb A Helping Hand), I knew that Errol Winston is headed for doom from the opening pages when he lands up one evening on the doorstep of the Didcots, a white, elderly couple. It’s raining cats and dogs, and Errol seems soaked to the skin while also coughing badly. Mrs Didcot, shuffling to the door peers at the paper he thrusts at her, which contains an advertisement for a room on rent. It appears that Errol has made a mistake, and has arrived at the wrong address, there’s certainly no room to let at the Didcots. Errol prepares to leave, but Mrs Didcot takes pity on him, particularly concerned with his hacking cough, and invites him inside to warm himself by the fire, while Mrs Didcot prepares a pot of tea. Deeply exhausted, Errol settles on a chair and falls asleep, and it is during this time that her husband, Arthur Didcot walks in.

In A Dark Corner then, we find ourselves in classic Celia Dale territory, where we are given a glimpse of pure evil that lurks beneath an outward façade of respectability. The overarching premise is pretty similar to A Helping Hand – a couple taking in a lodger in an act of altruism which they believe sets them on high moral ground in the perception of society; how can their kindness be questioned?

KÄSEBIER TAKES BERLIN by Gabriele Tergit (Translated from German by Sophie Duvernoy)

Set in 1920s Berlin, Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin, is a lively, zesty satire of the excesses of the period highlighting the power of the press, the transitory nature of the latest news and fads, overhyped personalities, consumerism, and the inevitable downfall fuelled by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. A novel bursting with a slew of characters, it is difficult really to focus on any one, but the essence of the plot is essentially this:

In the newsroom of Berliner Rundschau, on what has been a slow news week, editor-in-chief Georg Miermann pushes one of his key reporters, a sarcastic man, Emil Gohlisch to publish his article on an upcoming folksy singer. Gohlisch initially haws and hums, but eventually gets his story on Käsebier printed as front page news. Soon, another noted journalist but struggling poet Otto Lambeck writes his piece on a Käsebier show and the breadth of his talent in a rival newspaper, Berliner Tageszaitung, and in the blink of an eye, Käsebier becomes a raging sensation.

In a pace that’s intensely frenetic, Tergit captures the pulse of the period brilliantly in her prose – light and airy, comic and satirical, but also dark and profound. The novel particularly becomes absorbing in the second half when the focus narrows down to certain plot points and is not all over the place.

NOT A RIVER by Selva Almada (Translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott)

Set in a rural region of Argentina, Selva Almada’s Not a River is a brilliant, spare novella about male friendship, trauma, encroaching boundaries, unexpressed guilt, grief, and violence. There’s a cinematic feel to the opening pages as we are presented with the image of Enero Rey standing on the boat in the vast river, poised with a gun. He is not alone, accompanying him is his good friend El Negro and a young kid called Tilo.

The three have come to this island on a camping trip, to spend quality time together, for some much-needed male bonding. Tilo’s father, Eusebio, also a good friend of Enero and El Negro died many years ago, drowned in that very river. On this particular fishing expedition, the three are in pursuit of a large, beautiful sting ray; Enero, dazed by the wine and heat, fires more bullets than is necessary to bring it in. Their activities attract the attention of the island inhabitants – first, a coterie of boys to be followed by a mysterious man called Aguirre, who seems offended by the presence of the three and the manner in which they catch the ray. The sense of tension between the men is immediately palpable, glints of latent menace that fill Enero, El Negro, and Tilo with a sense of foreboding.

Written in a spare, lean style, and impressive in the way it manages to pack the weight of its themes into these slim pages, Not a River is another excellent work by Selva Almada, although The Wind That Lays Waste and Dead Girls remain my favourites. 

LAST WORDS FROM MONTMARTRE by Qiu Miaojin (Translated from Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich)

Last Words from Montmartre begins on an ominous note signaling the author’s intention to commit suicide, evident not only from the title but also from this epigraph – “For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead.” Deeply confessional and an intense, lyrical book about betrayal, heartbreak, passion, breakdown, and death, the novel is structured as a series of letters and diary entries addressed by the unnamed narrator to various lovers, friends, and family members, offering an intimate glimpse into the protagonist’s inner world. Based on the subject matter alone, it is not always an easy read, but the fierce tone and richness of the writing make it pretty compelling.

Qiu Miaojin mysteriously committed suicide after writing Last Words from Montmartre but before its publication fueling discussions about the ‘autobiographical” nature of the novel. This ambiguity is further heightened by these cryptic words at the beginning of the novel – “If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written.” Don’t be fooled by the length – though short, this isn’t a novel that can be breezed through but rather like wine is meant to be sipped slowly and savoured. A book I’m very glad to have read and would recommend!

ONE AFTERNOON by Siân James  

One afternoon, our protagonist, Anna accidentally bumps into Charlie, a theatre actor who sweeps her off her feet and the two embark on a whirlwind affair. Anna, we soon learn, is a young widow with three daughters married to Giles who was a Director of the very theatre company which employs Charles and was considerably senior to her. Her daughters, delightfully, welcome this new man in their mother’s life, and while Anna is at first enchanted by his company, soon some insecurities and pangs of jealousy begin to filter in. To make matters complicated, Anna will soon learn of secrets in her deceased husband’s past, of which she had nary a clue, but will change her perception of her marriage and the man she married; factors that will also influence how she views her current relationship with Charlie, and another stodgy man with a tragic air about him who has also taken a fancy to her. This is an intelligent, lovely novel about romantic love, marriage, new relationships, fresh beginnings and finding your feet, and challenging conventional social mores, and the easy, loving relationship between Anna and her three daughters is so beautifully conveyed. The highlight of the book for me was the voice – there’s a charming openness to Anna’s personality as she narrates her story with such refreshing candour. Here’s a quote from the book that I posted on social media…

“However, Giles worked until he’d got everything exactly as he wanted it, including all the furniture. By this time I realise what a marvellous job he did; I’ve never wanted to alter a thing, not even a picture or ornament.

When all the work was finished, he completely lost interest in the house. I could tell that he was surprised by this, but with my vast childhood experience of playing house, I wasn’t at all. The joy was always in planning the rooms, arranging the furniture, finding the right boxes for table and chairs, searching out the kettle, the teapot and the ubiquitous jam jars. Once that was done, the game was deadly dull.”

EASTMOUTH AND OTHER STORIES by Alison Moore   

I loved these atmospheric, moody, beautifully written stories. Moore has a flair for unsettling her readers like she did in her superb novels Missing and Death and the Seaside. Again, I plan to put up a review of this collection soon, but here’s a quote from one of her stories called “Seabound” that I posted on Instagram…

“’I’ve spent my whole life here,’ said May.’ All my memories are here. All my things are here.’ She felt at home, in that house on the cliff edge against which the sea beat. Daisy phoned every few days to see how she was, and May said she was fine.

Except sometimes she was troubled in the night. All alone in the big bed that had once belonged to her parents, May dreamt she stood in the shallows at the edge of the sea, which sucked the sand from beneath her feet. She went deeper. Vast and cold, the sea climbed her bare legs. It was rough, but she stood her ground. Sometimes, when she woke from these dreams, the sea was so loud it could have been right there in her room.”

That’s it for March and April. In May, I’ve been reading Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot as part of #NYRBWomen24 which is excellent so far, the combination of art and memoir is too irresistible and compelling. Plus, I’m also enjoying Lars Gustafsson’s A Tiler’s Afternoon which has a haunting, dreamlike quality to it.  

Last Words from Montmartre – Qiu Miaojin (tr. Ari Larissa Heinrich)

Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre is one of those books that had been languishing on my shelves for a long time, and one I wouldn’t have read had it not been selected by Kim for her marvellous “NYRBWomen24” group read. This is a very difficult book to write about given its style and subject matter, but here is an attempt nevertheless…

Last Words from Montmartre begins on an ominous note signaling the author’s intention to commit suicide, evident not only from the title but also from this epigraph – “For dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead.”

Deeply confessional and an intense, lyrical book about betrayal, heartbreak, passion, breakdown, and death, the novel is structured as a series of letters and diary entries addressed by the unnamed narrator to various lovers, friends, and family members, offering an intimate glimpse into the protagonist’s inner world. Based on the subject matter alone, it is not always an easy read, but the fierce tone and richness of the writing make it pretty compelling.

Qiu Miaojin mysteriously committed suicide after writing Last Words from Montmartre but before its publication fueling discussions about the ‘autobiographical” nature of the novel. This ambiguity is further heightened by these cryptic words at the beginning of the novel…

“If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere. The only connection between the chapters is the time frame in which they were written.”

The novel begins with a chapter called “Witness” where the unnamed narrator is addressing Yong, one of her earlier lovers, about being betrayed by Xu with whom the narrator was in a passionate relationship.  Xu, it seems, abandons the narrator suddenly one day, leaving her with their rabbit Bunny (“the crystallization of our three years of marriage”). Soon thereafter, Bunny dies, and our narrator is now bereft and on the verge of a mental collapse.

“For a month my body and mind were on the verge of total collapse, and Yong was the one who took me in and cared for me. For the first time she opened up to me, lightening the load of my longing and anguish and offering the passion and connection that I desired so desperately. Only then did I suddenly see what had actually happened this past year.”

Possibly as an act of catharsis, our unnamed narrator begins composing a series of letters written specifically to Xu, the love of her life, enumerating in detail and with piercing analysis, the nature of their relationship characterised by an all-consuming passion (“We can only be either wholly together or wholly apart, otherwise you’ll just keep hurting me and, wounded, I will hurt you again. This is the fundamental pattern of the love we share”), the narrator’s mercurial personality and possessiveness, which likely drives Xu away, but also a relationship that lays bare Xu’s passivity and resistance to volatile confrontations. Seen through the narrator’s lens, the character of their relationship is marked not only by deep love and intense passion but also by insults, cheating, heartbreak, misunderstandings, and lack of communication.

“I welcomed the care you showed me but whenever I sensed that deep down you didn’t love me, I lost it. That’s why my “desire for love” could grow even stronger while I also became suspicious of you, lashed out at you, and developed a neurosis and deteriorated. . . . As this happens, the hostile side of you that you’ve kept hidden began to be cruel, selfish, unfaithful, and declared relentlessly that you were leaving me and, most chilling words of all, that you didn’t love me. I turned into a sniper, as we both became so entrenched in our adversarial relationship that the most negative qualities of our personalities were pushed to their extremes. The sad thing is that neither of us could stop the momentum of careening toward the abyss, though ironically we still yearned to treat (or “love”) each other with kindness…”

As the novel progresses, more characters enter the fray, and it quickly becomes clear that all chapters aren’t necessarily letters, some seem to be diary entries…and not all of them are addressed to Xu but a series of people comprising earlier lovers, and friends and family members (an elder sister is mentioned as are the narrator parents Ma and Ba).

But while our narrator seems to be staring into the depths of an abyss, we are given a glimpse of various moments of happiness in her life too, however fleeting. She has her writing to sustain her, finding solace and expression through her art in a novel infused with references to literature, philosophy, creativity, and music. Repeated references are particularly made to the joys of watching movies made by filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, and to the enchanting quality of Paris. With a circle of friends and an involvement in politics, she isn’t entirely alienated from society, although inwardly her loneliness only deepens. But for the most part, the narrator grapples with feelings of despair, and disillusionment as she mulls on a variety of themes such as trust, definitions of sex and love, cowardice, emotional maturity, or even finding an anchor, always revealing a mind that is gradually unraveling as she toys with the idea of death and relief. In these letters, the narrator is not afraid of exposing the various facets of her personality – sometimes poignant, sometimes horrifying – and even the erotic quality of her desires, the act of writing evolving into a dialogue with herself.

Throughout this enigmatic text, the identity of the narrator remains slippery. The book’s opening pages feel deceptively straightforward – the narrator is a woman in Paris writing letters to her lover Xu who has abandoned her, Xu being probably now in Taipei. But as the book progresses, this allegedly clear picture begins to get hazy. The reader’s assumptions are always questioned – for the most part, it appears that the narrator is female, sometimes it seems that the narrator has a male identity. Then the figure of Zoë makes a presence – Is Zoë male or female? Is Zoë the narrator or another person altogether? More importantly, is this ambiguity around gender deliberate on the author’s part? Does gender really matter when examining the universal themes of sex, love, infidelity, and heartbreak?

If you are looking for linearity in this novel, there isn’t any, as it flits between Paris, Tokyo, and Taipei, the past and the present; plot has no relevance here, it’s a novel with impressionistic vibes, a piece of art to experience; the only consistent factor is the essence of its themes of love, passion, and despair.

“If a couple’s resentments aren’t vocalized, then their love can’t flow. The mutual resentment in our hearts is the main reason our love cannot move forward.”

Then, there is a lush feel to Miaojin’s descriptions, particularly palpable in her evocative portrayal of a wintery-spring Paris evening (“Dusk in the Latin Quarter was like a fairy tale or a love poem, like a Klimt mosaic, like glowing, rose-colored clouds reaching toward the heavens . . . a swath of gold ringed in a misty-blue halo, this was the Paris that most entranced me”), or while conveying the essence of Tokyo (“And Tokyo is the cherry blossoms, the sunset at dusk, dawn sunlight through her windows, the cry of the crow, the cityscape of darkened rooms on a rainy evening, the depth of feeling in her eyes”), or even while expressing the simple pleasures of companionship…

“I want to take her on my bike to the woods. I want to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her; listen to music with her before bed; read poetry to her, and while I work during the day she can wander away and do whatever she likes until dusk when we’ll walk along the Seine or stroll through the streets…I want to go to the Louvre with her, and at night visit the park in Villette; I want to take her to see Angelopoulos movies and to listen to Argerich’s wild concerts; I want to take pictures of us around the fourth arrondissement as we sweep the dust from the cracks of our everyday lives…If she could stay longer, I would finish my novel and write poetry for her, and make art for her.”

In a nutshell, in Last Words from Montmartre, Qiu Miaojin’s lyrical prose and raw, frank, introspective storytelling captures the emotional intensity of the protagonist’s journey, making it a heartfelt exploration of love and identity. Don’t be fooled by the length – though short, this isn’t a novel that can be breezed through but rather like wine is meant to be sipped slowly and savoured. A book I’m very glad to have read and would recommend!