July Reads

Disclaimer, Tendai (T. L.) Huchu is a friend, so I wouldn’t be on here badmouthing his latest but thankfully, I don’t have to. Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments (great title and how I’ve started referring to my wife, who is a nurse) is book two in Edinburgh Nights, a fantasy series set in the capital. I always think you can’t really judge a series on the first book because the author is still feeling their way into the world and writing with one eye on publication. Book two, if done properly, should have none of the teething issues and should explore the world in more detail, going deeper rather than further. Huchu does exactly that here, fleshing out characters we’ve already met, exploring parts of his world already introduced, rather than starting again in a new corner of the map. Ropa’s voice and Huchu’s style throughout is exciting, absolutely cutting edge in linguistic register and references and is a pleasure to read. Plus you’ve got to admire someone who can write about schools of magic in Scotland without ever treading on the toes of prior behemoths. Already looking forward to book three, particularly now that the Aberdeen school of magic has been trailed. My Aberdonian mind was set into overdrive imagining that.

Louise Welsh has returned to the world of Rilke, the protagonist of her debut The Cutting Room and thank the gods she has. While I adored her Plague Times trilogy she truly sparkles when she constructs crime plots around contemporary issues that incite her ire. How her books haven’t been made into multiple series by Netflix et al is simply beyond me: The Second Cut would blow things like Slow Horses out the water. Get on it TV world. Coincidentally both Welsh and Huchu quote Miyamoto Musashi in these books. Is there a resurgence in Musashi studies recently?

As promised last month I got Central Station by Lavie Tidhar off the back of Neom. Based on what I’d heard/read, I was expecting a 700-page tome but it was the standard 250 pages and not at all what I’d been led to believe. It was constructed from short stories set in the same universe, rewritten and edited together and it showed. Honestly, I much preferred Neom, as the through-narrative flowed better, and the sub-plots came together much more satisfactorily. The writing was still excellent but I guess one problem with reading books out of chronological order is that writers (usually) improve with each book so you are, in a sense, taking a step backwards through the author’s development. I’ll definitely read more by Tidhar but I won’t let my expectations get so high next time.

Following on from belatedly discovering The Lowland, I got hold of a copy of Interpreter of Maladies. Another coincidence, given this is the second book I read this month with the not-particularly-common word “maladies” in the title. Lahiri is the kind of short story writer who makes me despair. Short stories have never been my forte and collections like this just make me want to give it all up. Vivid, rich, complete worlds in a handful of pages, every word perfectly weighted, each story the exact shape it needs to be. Beautiful. Depressingly so.

I’m not really sure what to make of Downfall by Per-Olov Enquist. As I’ve said before I’m doing a deep dive on Enquist having discovered him early last year, but most of the English translations are out of print so it’s a bit of mission. This seems to be the most obscure as it isn’t even listed on Goodreads. It’s a slight novella, just over a hundred pages, but so far it’s the most intriguing of his books. It reminds me of Italo Calvino in a way - dreamlike, occasionally confusing, not at all constrained by the boundaries of reality. It concerns “monsters” of various types, mainly what used to be described as “circus freaks.” The narrator ponders the fact that when he was young (early 20th century) “monsters” were everywhere, a major form of entertainment in Europe, but today they have disappeared. Meanwhile modern “monsters” are killers, particularly children who kill other children. This book may be a companion to the play Hour of the Lynx, which I also read this month. Both centre around child murderers held in the care system so clearly this was something that Enquist was fascinated by: his compost aesthetic (reusing material) in strong evidence here. I think I may need to read this a couple more times to really get a handle on it. No great chore there.

This was my first and perhaps only foray into Enquist’s plays (I think this is the only English translation of his plays). I enjoyed them all with the proviso that reading plays is never as good as watching them. The Hour of the Lynx has been made into a film so I’m planning to track that down. Part of the problem I had here is that Enquist has used the same “documentary” style he employs for his novels, turning the lives of real famous people into drama. In the novels it doesn’t matter if you are familiar with those he explores because the narrative fills in the blanks. Not so here. There were clearly layers that those au fait with the lives of August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlof, and Hans Christan Anderson would have got that passed me by. Good writing but I’ll stick to his novels from now on.