Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?
Your round-up of the weekend's newspaper book reviews June 3/4
There is one novel that everyone is talking about this week. My friends keep texting me: “have you read it yet?”
“I can’t put it down.”
And so of course I will have to write about it here. It seems that the reason there is such a buzz among my friends (many of them authors) about YELLOWFACE is because this is ‘a biting satire of the publishing industry’. Ah, now it all makes sense.
According to The Week: “The story follows June, a 20-something white author struggling to revive her writing career while harboring envy of her frenemy and fellow writer, Athena Liu. Whereas June's debut flopped, Athena has had runaway success as the latest Asian-American author of note. After Athena's accidental death, June steals her unreleased manuscript and passes it off as her own.”
At this point I am getting Tony Hancock in The Rebel vibes.
“Kuang fully intends to make readers uncomfortable in her exploration of the pervasiveness of cultural appropriation, racism, and tokenism in the publishing industry, based on her own experiences as a published author.”
Ooh, this sounds juicy…
The Guardian reviewed it a couple of weeks ago hailing it a ‘wickedly funny literary thriller.’ It’s author, Rebecca F Kuang is no newbie to the book world, she is also the author of the bestselling BABEL.
“The novel starts with the pair toasting Athena’s success in her ritzy apartment after a night on the town; Juniper, our narrator, is choking down her resentment when, suddenly, Athena is literally – and fatally – choking on a homemade pancake…”
I mean, what would you do…?
“Juniper … basks in the glow of success – at least until Twitter raises its collective eyebrow and she’s mired in an ever-widening plagiarism scandal. Sustaining the fraud in the eye of the storm requires ever more manic deception – and self-deception. After all, didn’t Juniper simply midwife a far-from-ready draft that might otherwise never have seen daylight? And in the first place, hadn’t Athena once strip-mined sensitive details of Juniper’s personal life for an early short story? And it’s so hard for white writers to catch a break these days…”
Anthony Cummins, reviewing for The Guardian, said he ‘wolfed it down more avidly than anything I’ve read this year.’ So it seems my friends’ reviews were right. You can buy YELLOWFACE here.
Friend of The Book Room, Marianne Power reviewed THIS RAGGED GRACE by Octavia Bright in The Times Saturday Review this week. Bright is co-host of a brilliant podcast called Literary Friction that I highly recommend where she interviews various writers on various themes, but her first non-fiction book concerns themes far closer to home.
At 27, Bright found herself in a psychiatrist’s office being told she was an alcoholic and this is her memoir of her recovery, according to Marianne: “[this book] is not a tell-all tale of her descent to the bottom and her rise to redemption. Instead it is a beautifully written and intellectual account of a woman coming to terms with herself. The book charts the seven years following her sobriety, during which she moved between London, the Italian volcanic island of Stromboli, New York, Cornwall and Margate in an attempt to get lost in new places in the way she had got lost in alcohol.”
At the same time as Bright embarks on this journey, her father is facing a descent into his own disease, that of dementia. Bright writes: “While I was trying to rebuild myself, it became clear that my father was sliding in the opposite direction. The edifice of his mind had begun to dismantle itself brick by brick.”
Marianne describes how the book ends in lockdown with Bright on the phone to her father who has lost much of his ability to speak and is now in a care home. He can only say ‘What else can you see?’ over and over as Bright describes what is on the other side of her window – his way of keeping her on the other end of the phone.
“Her sensitivity to the world is what makes the writing so beautiful and, ultimately, hopeful. Death hovers on every page and yet this book is full of life.”
You can buy THIS RAGGED GRACE here.
The i newspaper reviewed Susan Sontag’s newly published essay collection, ON WOMEN in its pages this weekend. This book has been put together and edited by Sontag’s son David Rieff who has gathered seven pieces of her journalism and interviews from the 1970s into one place for our delectation, though Fiona Sturges, reviewing for the i, said they could be just as relevant today:
“In the opening essay, ‘The Double Standards of Aging’ Sontag rails against men being permitted to age, with their stately silver hair and characterful wrinkles, while women are seen as washed up the age of 40.“
Strangely I only read this very essay last week as I was preparing to interview Victoria Smith for my writing retreat. Here is an extract from that essay that I pulled out for discussion with Victoria, and as I read it, I thought exactly the same as Sturges, this could be written last week:
“The emotional privileges this society confers upon youth stir up some anxiety about getting older in everybody. All modern urbanised societies – unlike trivial, rural societies – condescend to the values of maturity and heap honours on the joys of youth. This revaluation of the life cycle in favour of the young brilliantly serves a secular society whose idols are ever-increasing industrial productivity and the unlimited cannibalism of nature. Such a society must create a new sense of the rhythms of life in order to incite people to buy more, to consume and throw away faster. People let the direct awareness they have of their needs, of what really gives them pleasure, be overruled by commercialised images of happiness and personal well-being; and, in this imagery designed to stimulate ever more avid levels of consumption, the popular metapor for happiness is ‘youth’.”
This is an essay collection that has stood the test of time.
Back to Sturges: “Sontag’s language is urgent, irritable and bold provocative. Along with spotlighting Sontag’s feminist preoccupations, this collection underlines how feminism, with its clashing viewpoints and ideologies, was no more harmonious then than it is now.”
You can buy ON WOMEN here.
The Sunday Times Book of the Week went to BEE GEES: CHILDREN OF THE WORLD. This band of brothers were hit-makers in the seventies with six consecutive number ones and 220 million record sales, but I have to say I knew very little about them, so even Victoria Segel’s review in The Sunday Times made for fascinating reading. Did you know, for example, that the boys hailed from the Isle of Man? Did you know that due to their deliquency they became Ten Pound Poms and headed off to Australia? Did you know that by the age of 12, Barry Gibb claimed to have already written 180 songs?
“Their dynamic was often fractious,” writes Segel, “and their career was similarly unstable. The book vividly shows how delicate the ecosystems of a band’s success can be… the book stands as a loving vindication of the band, moving beyond the hothouse chest hair and florid falsettos to illuminate an elusive, undersold story.”
Whether you choose a Father’s Day present, or a guilty pleasure for yourself (I won’t tell!), you can buy BEE GEES: CHILDREN OF THE WORLD here.
Before I go, would you like to know what I’ve been reading this week? In anticipation of the writing retreat with Victoria Smith, I decided to make it through her Writers Recommend curation. I managed to read WIDE SARGASSO SEA and ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT.
I lost my copy of WIDE SARGASSO SEA years ago and so when Victoria recommended it I took the plunge and bought another copy and I’m so pleased I did, it is a absolute classic and now I’m desperate to go back to Jane Eyre for the first time in (coughs) 30-odd years and also the biography of its author I recommended on these pages a few weeks ago I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE: THE HAUNTED LIFE OF JEAN RHYS.
If you want to read a novel that is a perfect example of a voice that grips you from the first page with voice and carries you along, then I can’t recommend ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT highly enough. It is the perfect example of this and it is also so, so funny.
So there, you go, it’s worth checking out my Writers Recommend curations, you find some real forgotten gems.
Until next week…
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