February’s second batch of paperbacks includes three I’ve already read, beginning with one likely to be a Marmite book with knobs on for many readers.
One of my books of last year, Helen Oyeyemi’s inventive, playful Parasol Against the Axe follows a hen party which has descended on Prague, Oyeyemi’s beloved adopted home and the narrator of the novel. One of them has come with a copy of Paradoxical Undressing, a most unusual book about the city. Prague guides us through her own streets, telling the stories of the novel’s principal players leaving a multitude of loose ends untied. Oyeyemi slips in episodes from city’s history via the endlessly morphing Paradoxical Undressing, from sixteenth-century nobility to Second World War taxi dancers to the Communist ‘60s although not in that order. Every reader, it seems, has a very different experience of the book, rather like readers will with Oyeyemi’s, I suspect. I wasn’t at all sure at the beginning of her novel but ended up loving it. Best be prepared for some mystification if you decide to give it a try.
Leo Vardiashvili takes his narrator back to Georgia in Hard By a Great Forest, the country Saba left with his father and brother in 1992, aged eight, leaving his mother behind. Eighteen years later, his father has returned followed by his brother and both are now missing. When Saba arrives, his passport is confiscated. Dazed, with nowhere to stay, he’s rescued by a cab driver who spots an opportunity. As Saba and Nodar take off on a dangerous journey which leads them over the closed border into breakaway Ossetia, the narrative takes on the pace of a thriller and the humour of the opening chapters drops away. Vardiashvili spins a good story, laying bare the fallout of the Soviet Union and its effects on ordinary people – the horrors of civil war, the loss of family, the sacrifices made – while reminding us there will always be hope.
I gave up Caoilinn Hughes’s The Orchid and the Wasp but had better luck with The Wild Laughter so have my fingers crossed for The Alternatives. Olwen took on the care of her three sisters when their parents died, all four now adults leading very different lives. When Olwen disappears, her siblings return to the family home to confront their difficult past and look to an uncertain future. ‘Fiercely witty and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers’ promises the blurb.
Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown sees a woman walk out of her Dublin home one morning, leaving her husband and two teenage children asleep. Two days later she finds herself alone in a Welsh cottage having spent time in a many different places along the way, including the beds of strangers, no longer able to ignore the breakdown which has been building within her for some time. ‘From one of Ireland’s most provocative and admired writers, this is a story of rage and reckoning, joy and transformation’ says the blurb, whetting my appetite nicely.
February’s second paperback short story collection comes from Bridget O’Connor who died in 2010, aged only 49. After a Dance is a collection of 15 of her stories all but one first published in the 1990s. Most are hardly more than a few pages, some quite striking, ranging from the titular story in which a young girl spends the night with a boy she meets at a dance finding it an unsettling experience, tossing and turning all night while he snores beside her, echoed by his uncle downstairs, to the final darkly comic piece in which a clifftop cafe owner shares what she plans to be her last supper with a criminal, inadvertently rescuing him from impending trouble. O’Connor’s stories explore human nature with sharp observation and a black humour, sometimes with a dash of the surreal.
That’s it for February. A click on a title will take you either to my review or to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with part one it’s here. New fiction is here and here.
