First Saturday of the month and time for the super monthly tag Six Degrees of Separation, which is hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, Six Degrees of Separation #6degrees picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Links to my reviews are in the titles of the books chosen. The starter book this month is:
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Although I own a lovely Folio Society edition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, I’ve not actually read it – but I have seen the film and the stage play. You may not know, but it is an epistolary novel, written in letters, mostly between the novel’s two main protagonists, lovers-turned-rivals the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. It is also a #MeToo novel in effect, way before its time!
Another French #MeToo novel that is epistolary in nature is:
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes
Can exchange of emails be epistolary – yes, I think so. They’re performing the same function, just more instant. Despentes lockdown novel is one such exchange between an ageing actress and a writer accused of sexual harassment. The writer’s sister used to play with the actress when they were young, and he had posted a comment on seeing the actress now, that she was ageing badly, receiving a ‘Dear Dickhead’ reply from her. And thus begins their email exchange, which morphs into them helping each other through addictions. Funny and direct, Despentes (as translated by the wonderful Frank Wynne) doesn’t disappoint.
Another lockdown novel is:
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
Nunez’s narrator gives us another mixture of life and often flyaway musings on friendship, reading and writing. It’s certainly a winning combination that keeps things light, and is told with a degree of clear-eyed self-deprecation and plenty of humour on the narrator’s part. This is Nunez’s lockdown novel, and charts how her unnamed narrator gets through it. She ends up parrot-sitting for a friend of a friend who’s been stranded with Covid elsewhere. Parrots are social creatures, so as she needs to spend several hours a day in the bird’s company, she moves into the rather grand apartment. Said bird, named Eureka, is quite a character, and the narrator finds herself really enjoying their time together….
Another novel with a parrot is
Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
The execution of this story is totally bonkers, madcap, and hilarious. It’s nigh-on impossible to understand what’s going on, but I just went with the flow and enjoyed it very much. It concerns a young programmer called Sasha who ends up working in an odd concern. The institution in question is ‘The National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy’ (NITWITT!), but Hogwarts it ain’t. Those who work here are seriously studying the science of magic. One of the strands to this tale nvolves a dead parrot – in this case, a green one, which keeps reappearing and dying again. The translation in this edition by Andrew Bromfield dates from 2002, and I spotted his use of Pythonesque words like ‘expired’ to describe the parrot. (I got a translator’s in-joke!) I loved the way that the Strugatskys treated magic as stuff that science hasn’t worked out yet and thus worthy of dedicated research. It’s all done very seriously, and thus is all the more hilarious for it.
Another novel that looks at science vs magic is
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
‘A witch, a scientist and the end of the world’. That tag line got me. This novel tries to do something that is not often seen in genre fiction – melding fantasy and urban SF in a dystopian setting. It’s also a romance and coming of age story with a thrilling edge to it. Patricia, who discovered she could talk to birds aged six, will become a witch. Meanwhile, Laurence is a geek who would spend all his hours in front of a screen or tinkering with things and is inventing a time-machine. Their careers will force them down different avenues – but they are destined to be together. The author has tried throughout to get the balance between science and magic right. Both sides have their internal rivalries and shades of goodness. There are no real villains on either side, just misunderstandings and misplaced beliefs.
I’m staying with birds for:
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I S Berry
An Edgar-winning debut written by a former CIA staffer, this thriller introduced me to 2010s Bahrain where the author lived for some time, and a world of political foment between the various sects, in which the Americans take an interest there. Meet world-weary Shane Meadows, due to return home, but to what? Under pressure to get information, he meets and falls for local artist, Almaisa, who is not what she seems… Having a wonderful sense of place and history, if I were to pitch this book, I’d describe it as Greene meets Le Carré in Bahrain.
I’ll finish with another peacock.
The Peacock by Isabel Bogdan
Why would a German author choose to write a sparkling comedy novel about a group of bankers on a work retreat in the Scottish Highlands? I was pondering this as I read this hilarious novel which was a bestseller in Germany. Then I remembered that the Germans rather love British comedy, and indeed watch an old British sketch from the 1960s called Dinner For One every year on New Year’s Eve–and then it began to make more sense. Things begin to unravel with the discovery of a dead peacock in the woods… Only the reader ever knows the full picture of what’s happening in this deliciously funny story. Everyone else only knows a little part of things and thus misunderstandings abound and cover-ups complicate things yet further, then they get snowed in. It’s amazing how the author and translator (Annie Rutherford) have produced something so authentically Scottish between them, and managed to build in an air of ancient and modern coming together too. It’s doubly amazing that this book is really very chucklesome indeed,
I’ve gone from French letters to the Scottish Highlands via madcap Russians and with a variety of birds this month. Where will your six degrees take you?
