The Booker Review

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  • Warm-Up for Booker 2026 : Staying On (Paul Scott, Booker winner 1977), and, River East River West (Aube Rey Lescure, Women’s Prize Shortlisted 2024)

    I can’t pretend: I didn’t choose these two books for any particular reason other than I was lent them both at the same time. But a comparison of them struck me as inescapable, so here we are.

    Both are stories of “staying on”, in a sense.

    Staying On, both set in and written in the 1970s, tells the story of a British couple living in a run-down hotel in post-colonial India – the last of their social group to have stayed behind after independence in 1947. We watch Tusker, a retired army colonel, struggle to fit in to a society which has clearly left his type of people behind, while his wife Lucy pines nostalgically for a Britain (or “Yookay,” as their servant calls it) that she hasn’t seen for forty years. The tone resembles a black comedy and there is an element of the Fawlty Towers-esque about their situation, the absolute peak importance of who will mow the lawn.

    River East River West, meanwhile, begins in 2007 Shanghai, where 15-year-old Alva longs for an America she has never seen. The mood here is perhaps more sombre as Alva’s American mother, a failed actress who also “stayed on” after moving to East Asia as a young adult, clearly struggles with alcohol, and a number of bad things happen to everyone in the story. Not least to Alva’s Chinese stepfather, Lu Fang, who was “sent down to the country” along with the other university students in the 1960s – an event which upturned his whole life and from which he has never really recovered.

    In some ways, both novels’ Western women protagonists – British Lucy; American Sloan – suffer a strange kind of oppression of privilege. Being white in largely non-white countries, they are treated as movie stars and millionaires, even as they scrabble in the dust for money and security. Though surrounded by company, they seem weighed down by a profound loneliness of never being considered “local”. For the younger Alva, the isolation is all the more piercing: Neither the Chinese kids with whom she shares her school days, nor the American expat community she inveigles her way into, want to claim her as her own. In both stories there is sometimes a feeling less of “staying on”, more of “been left behind”.

    We see the blows coming before they land. Reading River East River West, I find myself constantly muttering “oh no” and “oh dear” as the axe begins to swing, nothing too unexpected. And yet the blows still hurt. Even Staying On, which begins at the end – a death on the first page, Agatha Christie-style – was surprising in its emotional poignancy when the end finally arrives for real, bracing for the impact we know must happen because it has already happened.

    In the end, one story ends with a coming together; the other with a breaking apart.

    As a linguist, an interesting comparison which struck me about these two novels is the way in which the authors handle immersion in their characters’ worlds through incorporating the local language, and how the reader’s understanding of this can influence our own feelings of isolation or involvement in these worlds. For me, not knowing any Hindi, I could sometimes feel a little wrongfooted by the language of Staying On, with its sprinklings of memsahib, mali, malum… – as, presumably, the author intended. River East River West, on the other hand, makes the interesting choice of frequently including actual Chinese writing with no clue as to pronunciation. Which is 没问题 for me (see what I did there), but I imagine could be a jarring experience for non-speakers for Chinese, not knowing how to read aloud words in the middle of a sentence. Encountering this, I sometimes felt like I was in on an in-joke.

    In River East River West, too, the Chinese is truly part of the story, the repeated motif of 囚 qiu (“prisoner”, a word made up of a person 人 in a box 口) resurfacing again and again to illustrate how trapped Lu Fang has felt – how trapped they all are, really, in their own lives.

    “Could a person live out her life in a foreign country as performance art?” wonders Alva, as she worries that her not-quite-expat not-quite-local life has all been a fake.

     But then isn’t all of life anywhere a performance art?               

  • Week 14-and-then-some: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai)

    “‘It must be scary to be here on your own.’ ‘It’s scary to age alone.’ ‘It’s scary to be young alone.’ ‘We are all ultimately alone.’”

    When a book begins with a whole-ass family tree, you know it’s going to be something of an epic. And this epic took me so long to wade through that I’ve been listening to Christmas carols on Classic FM whilst reading it. I’m not sure if that added much to the atmospherics of an Indian summer or not, but I do think my main complaint here is the length, as it is my personal policy that no story should run over 600 pages unless it is literally Anna Karenina. (And I only ever managed to read the first 400 pages of Anna Karenina. 🤷‍♀️)

    Set at the turn of the millennium, the narrative follows… what, exactly? The story has the feeling of a slow-moving serial (not unlike Anna Karenina, in fact!) as the characters convene and diverge, taking us on a tour of India and the USA, Italy and Mexico.

    Sunny and Sonia, separately, are sent to study in America as young adults. Both are writers and both, we are told, are lonely. We hear much about their families at home in India – the feuds, the corruption scandals, the lives of servants. The delicious kebabs. Sonia becomes involved with an older artist in the US, who treats her poorly. Sunny accompanies a childhood friend (Satya) on a trip home to seek a wife, and attends their honeymoon as a sort of chaperone.

    It is sometimes difficult to specifically identify the thread holding such a meandering story together, or where we are going with it, but motifs appear and reappear in a somehow reassuring way. The ‘ghost hound’ chasing Sonia around the world, Sunny’s mother’s last exhortation to her husband. (“Ratty, don’t die. If you live, I will love you – after all!) The tricks we employ like a talisman against the inevitable.

    I found the character of Sonia probably the most interesting; and her eventual relationship with Bhatia (Sunny’s mother). Sharing a house in a place neither of them come from, plagued by bandicoots, through a completely inexplicable series of events, they finally find openness with each other. The things you can only say in the dark.

    The story of Sonia and Sunny meanders very gently: the dance of choosing a mate is interesting. “Why here exactly?” wonders Satya’s wife on the eve of their wedding, “Why am I married to this man exactly?” Everything is a series of chance encounters; but in another way, we have a sense that fate is at work. That it doesn’t matter if they sometimes feel lonely or lost, because everything that is going to happen will happen. A reassuring thought indeed.

  • Week 13-ish: Flashlight (Susan Choi)

    “Sometimes, the unjustly downtrodden took up arms and fierce miens, but equally often they turned the other cheek, studied harder, camouflaged themselves ever more behind obedience and merit and bided their time, believing against all evidence that the future would bring something better, for them if for nobody else. He tried to be the second kind of ruined person.”

    Flashlight begins and ends with Louisa, but is really the story of her father, Serk. It is a story about hope and loss; and, primarily, it is a story about identity.

    Serk is a man of many names. Born in Japan at the end of the Second World War, he goes by ‘Hiroshi’ at school and ‘Seok’ at home. He feels Japanese, but the Japanese don’t recognise him as such because his family are ethnic Koreans. Against his prophesying warnings, his parents and siblings heed the magnetic siren-call of the new DPRK, migrating to North Korea in hopes of a better life, while he instead leaves for college in the US and rebrands himself as ‘Serk’. Interestingly, this name change is never once mentioned, leaving the reader with a faintly unsettled undercurrent of feeling as we try to decode his true self. Who is this man really: teacher, father, spy?

    Years later, Serk returns to Japan on an academic posting with his American wife Anne and daughter Louisa. Anne and Serk each secretly meet family members in Japan, while Louisa slides effortlessly into Japanese school life. Anne is becoming more and more ill – nobody yet knows why. And then calamity really strikes as Louisa is found washed up on the shore, alone, after a night-time walk with her father along the beach.

    We hear the story out of order, following each of Louisa, Serk and Anne in turn, sometimes with cameo appearances from other characters, the narrative spanning decades and continents. The motif of the flashlight somehow ties the story together across this space and time, in a way that brings to mind the silver sword – another childhood favourite of mine – yet more complicated, too. Less a symbol of pure hope than of hope waning; of seeing things and not seeing them. So many secrets, so much unknown.

    I found Serk’s story utterly riveting, full of mysteries. Although I foresaw some of the reveals, I still found them delicious when they happened. Conversely, I found something slightly repellent in Anne’s story – perhaps just a little too close to home? – feeling anger rising as the doctors dismiss her very real symptoms, a case of documented medical misogyny in action.

    And Louisa I simply found highly relatable. A scene depicting a séance around a flashlight in a youth hostel feels so… autistic? Shut out of the social group for stating facts; ruminating over some imagined offence to people who have long since forgotten everything she said. She starts out as somewhat of an unreliable narrator, yet I found her very likeable, clearly processing her grief and trauma through maladaptive coping mechanisms.

    A theme of resilience draws the reader on at each turn: “Coming back to herself at such moments, she thinks, Life is over. But apparently not. There are more things to cherish and lose.”

    Side note: If you’re going to attempt 13 books in 3 months, don’t leave the longest ones till last 😉

    That said, I found Flashlight a powerful tale, and one that I didn’t like to rush.

  • Week 12: The Land in Winter (Andrew Miller)

    “The snow had changed things. They were in the world differently now, people understood that.”

    I have always found that there is a magical quality about snow: it creates a liminal space out of the ordinary where everything stops, and somehow, there, life happens. People come together or are pushed apart.

    Eric and Irene, Rita and Bill. Two couples living next door to each other in rural England, during the Big Freeze of 1963. How to describe them? Eric is the village doctor. His wife, Irene, is pregnant. Rita is also pregnant, and fascinating: a former club dancer who reads books on the farmhouse floor by the Aga, she hears voices, and is friends with the Black projectionist at a Bristol cinema. Her husband, Bill, tries to raise the money to be a commercial farmer (one of their cows is called Nefertiti), leading his single bull around the yard: “When they fell out of step he felt the sudden tug, as though he were holding a planet on a kite string.”

    The Land in Winter is a story about big things found in small things. Pregnant women drinking Guiness together (a different time!), a man having an affair, a doctor on house calls. Life and death, but in a tiny way. There is nothing extraordinary about these lives, but somehow the story feels extraordinary.

    As we follow these four protagonists in their turns, the narrative knits together and apart like train tracks, their stories sort of drifting along next to each other like snow flurries – sometimes meeting, sometimes parting. We follow these characters into the storm (Where is Bill going? Where is Irene going??), their progression gentle yet strangely intriguing.

    These people seem stuck in the war somehow. Eric’s partner at the doctor surgery tries to process his Holocaust scars while at a party; Bill’s father repurposes his Anderson shelter as a home-made sauna; everyone remembers the Blitz. There is, too, a certain sense of Black Comedy – like the Peter Shaffer play – to the proceedings at times: a wife meets a mistress in a bedroom without recognising her; a woman fumbling around a literal School for the Blind in the dark. And the whole middle section of the book dispenses with chapter numbers: like snow drifts, we too are lost in the storm, in the blackout.

    As Irene walks home from the village shop, she contemplates: “And then the child would grow old and die, and the child’s child, and so on until it all stopped, countless little lives, her own perfectly invisible among so many.” Yet she finds this thought comforting, and so do I.

    Looking up at the stars – a cosmic ant – knowing that the biggest things you’ll ever experience are still tiny.

  • Week 11: One Boat (Jonathan Buckley)

    “I asked her: ‘But why are they here?’ To which the answer was the Big Bang, which was not an answer, because the Question of Questions wasn’t ‘Why are there stars in the sky?’ but rather ‘Why is anything anywhere?’”

    One Boat is a book that deals with Big Questions. A bereaved woman retraces her footsteps through a Greek village from another visit some years earlier: contemplating consciousness, finding connection. The mood is melancholy and pensive, and a bit bleak. The characters she meets and re-meets are maybe part of each other’s greater story, maybe not.

    The overall atmosphere is very ‘meta’, in the sense that we are observing a woman observing her own mundane notes taken while observing others – not so much a story, even, as a vague waft of vignettes. She seems lost in introspection. Wrestling with questions to which there are no answers and in which most people aren’t that interested, she watches the people around her with intrigue and perhaps a little disdain, bathing in the silliness of village life and petty politics.

    Her philosophising, too, quickly rises to the level of absurdism. “Which is sillier, she asked: Thinking that fish have feelings, or thinking that allowing a female goat to graze on the holy mountain would take something away from the glory of the Virgin?”

    Well, quite.

    None of these thoughts are really novel, though – fun fact: Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi was already pontificating about whether fish in the Hao river could feel joy in the 4th century BCE – but maybe that’s sort of the point, that she’s so stuck in her head wrangling with these unanswerable questions that she’s missing the present entirely.

    There’s usually a single Booker choice each year that just makes me go, “…Huh?” This was that one. One Boat is one of those lofty works that makes me feel as if the narrative is taking place on some higher plane of existence, like a blend of spices too nuanced for my amateur palate. Often the critics rave about such books, while I feel stuck in some alternate dimension where the plot is craftily labelled ‘The Emperor’s New Storytelling’. Maybe that makes me uncultured, but at the end of the day I read for enjoyment, and I didn’t enjoy.

    One thing I did like, from this tiny textbook-esque almanack of living, was the narrator’s observations on the life of dogs: “Watching him lapping the water up, I uttered some banality about living in the moment – we observe life, I said, but animals live wholly within it.” Banalities are often mundane because they are true, and it reminded me of the aphorism about the past and future not really existing – that only the present is real. Our narrator, Teresa, demonstrates this rather finely by spending all of her time reminiscing about her past and contemplating what she ‘will’ write in the future. We would probably all do well to be reminded of this, from time to time.

  • Week 10: Endling (Maria Reva)

    “They needed each other to bear witness, because the rest of the world didn’t.”

    Thus begins the story of Yeva and her extremely endangered left-shelled snail companion, Lefty. (Did you know that snails have a ‘handedness’? Well, now you do.) Yeva travels round Ukraine in a mobile lab trailer, attempting to rescue and find mating partners for her ‘endlings’ – the last-of-a-species molluscs hibernating in her fridge. To fund this noble venture she participates in a marriage agency, paid to go on dates with wealthy foreigners. Although, as it turns out, Yeva is ace – asexual – and personally experiences no attraction, to anyone of any gender.

    There is a certain mindfulness to snail rescue, and a certain poetry to her iconoclastic life.

    Then – plot-twist! – Yeva agrees to lend the services of her mobile lab to a pair of sisters (Nastia and Sol) from the marriage agency, who plan to kidnap 12 bachelors to make a point about the evils of the mail-order bride industry. And here the war catches up with them.

    …Endling is really a very difficult book to describe. Not least because, just as the narrative temperature is rising deliciously to a crispy climax at the end of Part 1, the author interjects to completely break the fourth wall, writing as… herself? And the story becomes about something completely different – about three women fleeing from war, but also about an author abroad struggling to make sense of events as the news overtakes the creation of fiction.

    As if in a private soliloquy to the audience after the first act curtain of her story has come crashing down, Maria Reva speaks in different voices about the real worry of a grandfather refusing to leave his home in Kherson in the thick of the bombardment, the awkwardness of sipping oysters at a literary event while Kyiv burns, the role of humour in wartime –  Like, what are you meant to do when war breaks out in your face in the middle of your life, in the middle of your book? Reva is suddenly paddling like mad to keep up with reality, and she decides to bring us along for the swim.

    The second half of Endling brings three things to mind for me:

    The first is the start of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, a poignant yet comic depiction of ordinary Parisians’ flight at the outbreak of war (which, I read in French, FLEX 💪). Something highly relatable, yet slightly grotesque, about being more interested in saving one’s picnic cheese than escaping a war. Like being more interested in saving a snail than avoiding an invading Russian army.

    The second is 2023 Booker winner Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, set in an Ireland in the near future which is slowly descending into authoritarian tyranny, and brimming with a sense of “this could happen to you.”

    And the third is an advert by ActionAid, made early on during the conflict in Syria, which charts a child’s journey from normal everyday life through fleeing her home and becoming a refugee. Only the child is clearly in the UK. The tagline at the end of the advert, in a silent gut-punch, reads: “Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

    I remember being perplexed in 2022 that people in Europe who had blithely ignored the plight of refugees fleeing conflicts in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria, were suddenly tripping over themselves to welcome and support refugees from Ukraine. Was it because Ukraine was closer? Or was it that these people looked like ‘us’? I couldn’t really understand it.

    One of the interesting things in the grand theatre of war is that the small everyday things don’t go away, and in fact, if anything, perhaps they can become even bigger and more important. A bachelor still looking for a wife. A young woman still searching for her mother. And so I, too, found myself writing in my notebook: “I GET THAT THERE’S A REAL WAR ON BUT I AM SO INVESTED IN THIS SNAIL!!!”

    Maybe I will leave the final word to Pasha, one of the kidnapped bachelors, whose story we are to understand mirrors the author’s in some way: “It’s what you all do, in the free world. You waste your freedom and your clear skies on things that don’t matter, like politeness and the perfect lawn.”

    What is one supposed to do at the onset of war? Why do we care about some people, in some places, and not others? What matters and what doesn’t? In life, as in fiction, there are no neat answers to these questions.

  • Week 9: Audition (Katie Kitamura)

    “People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.”

    The first thing that struck me about Audition is this: The first sentence is wholly ungrammatical. Serial commas separate whole ideas, and this stylistic choice continues throughout the book. I found this jarring. But perhaps that’s the point?

    Audition is told in two parts. In some ways it is two stories, although it is also the same story.

    In Part 1, a 49-year-old actress (unnamed) is approached by a young man named Xavier who mistakenly thinks she might be his birth mother. Her husband suspects her of cheating, and we suspect they aren’t happy. She contemplates her decision not to have had children. Then Part 2: We begin the story again. Same narrator, same placid husband, same Xavier – but this time he actually is her son. The three of them struggle to make sense of their family dynamic when Xavier moves back into the apartment.

    If the start of Part 1 can be described as “disorienting”, Part 2 is something else – less ‘sliding-doors’ than ‘kicking-the-door-off-its-hinges’. Then lightly barbecuing the door in the middle of the theatre stalls, while the audience looks on, bemused.

    “Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance is possible.”

    I get the idea, I do. The way her story mirrors the play she’s performing, Part 1 ending with her struggling to bridge the two halves of the play, saying it’s as if the writer grew bored of her character at the halfway mark and wrote an entirely new one. Then we are suddenly catapulted into Part 2 where it’s actually as if… well, you get the picture.

    But I don’t like it. While I find the idea interesting in theory, I found the execution of it feels – much of the time – vacuous and pretentious. It’s hard to feel anything for these characters. In my notebook while reading, possibly at the height of my irritation with the lack of plot and vapid character development, I wrote: “I feel like I’m swimming around in a muddy pond just bumping into random fish.”

    I do sometimes wonder if what causes me to really dislike a book is, primarily, being already in a bad mood while reading it. And maybe that’s true. But mainly the feeling I was left with when reading Audition is similar to the feeling I experience in a modern art gallery. I once heard it said about modern art – you know, the unmade bed/ half a pickled cow type – that all the big emotions were already taken up by the Great Painters and so now all that’s left is the small emotions, like, a mild sense of unease. Slight disgust. This book feels like that. “Meh.”

    One interesting aspect of the book is the nod to the identity politics of race. And as an aside here: I found that I had by default imagined each character as white, and experience some cognitive dissonance on discovering that they perhaps weren’t. Make of that what you will. On race, she talks a little of the burden of representation – of the audience members who approach her saying how nice it is to see “someone who looks like me” on the stage or screen – itself a new kind of invisibility, being reduced to a token type. The fact she remains unnamed throughout the narrative drives this feeling home, I felt.

    I suppose, in the end, she seems like a woman uncomfortable with her own life. But then when her life is imagined totally differently we find she is just as uncomfortable with that, too. So I think that is what I will choose to take away from this sludgy reading experience: The grass is always more cinematic on the other side of the theatre.

  • Week 8: The Shortlist is out!

    This isn’t it; this is my bookshelf showcasing the first half of my Booker reading project:

    I wasn’t kidding about The Little Prince being my favourite book, by the way; as you can see, I like to collect it in different languages from places I visit. You probably won’t guess, so I’ll tell you for free that the collection includes both Catalan and the Venetian dialect of Italian!

    This is the shortlist: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-booker-prize-2025-shortlist

    I find quite often that my favourites don’t make it off the longlist, and I’m sad that neither of Misinterpretation or The South made the cut on this occasion. In fact only 2/7 of the ones I’ve read so far have been shortlisted, though, so I look forward to reading the rest of them!

    One of the things I love about reader the Booker longlist is getting to take a world tour, with locals as my guide. So far this year I have been to the USA, Albania, Cumbria and Yorkshire (UK), Hungary and Malaysia – all from the comfort of my sunny reading chair! – and come back a little richer and wiser from each journey.

    I find it interesting reading the different perspectives on the same material, especially having taken some pains not to read any opinions about each work before embarking on it, even to the extent of ignoring the blurbs and summaries on the dust jackets. So, for example, now reviewing the books in my stack at the halfway point, I find that the inside cover of Flesh – which I described as basically a lot of nothingness, a sea of one-word answers adrift through life’s inevitable dramas, everything understated – calls the protagonist a man who “spirals out of control,” carried on “the 21st century’s tides of money and power.”

    Really? That wasn’t exactly how I experienced the story.

    I can’t quite agree, either, with Times reviewer Johanna Thomas-Corr’s proclamation that this shortlist “has rewarded maturity over novelty” (based primarily on the age of its authors). As probably my favourite of the bunch so far, I personally found Flesh to be very “novel,” and certainly unique. Although perhaps it still looks traditional in comparison to some recent Booker-longlisted stories which told entire stories in Twitter format (No One Is Talking About This, 2021) or in literal swirls and circles of words off the page (Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, 2022).

    Just for your entertainment and interest, here is a list of things I have learnt by googling what I’ve read to far:

    • There is no such thing as the ‘Cartmel Literature Festival’ (from Universality, Week 1), but it has its own website nonetheless (!). (And for a bonus point: I had also assumed this fictional event was modelled on the well-known Hay Festival, which I always thought was in Herefordshire, but I have now learnt is actually in Wales – just.)
    •  The age of consent in Hungary is 14, which means technically István in Flesh (Week 4) is not underage. I don’t know how I feel about this.
    • A “bodega” (as visited regularly in Misinterpretation, Week 6) is a New York word for what I think I would call a “corner shop”. It’s a Spanish word and might indicate a Hispanic neighbourhood.
    • “Naftali,” the surname of the Jewish-American family in The Rest Of Our Lives (Week 7), is derived from a Hebrew word naphtali meaning “my struggle.”
    • … And apparently my Week 2 review (The South) taught the word “anachronistic” to at least two people so far. (You know who you are, hello! 😊)

    Are you reading along? What are your favourites so far? Leave me a comment!

  • Week 7: The Rest Of Our Lives (Ben Markovits)

    “I had a sense of undigested emotional material, which is really just a disconnect between the totally normal passage of time you happen to be in and the totally normal passage of time that is about to follow, after which everything will be different.”

    The story opens – quite mundanely, I thought – with Tom, a 50-something-year-old New Yorker, driving his daughter off to college.  On the cusp of being ‘empty nesters,’ Tom and his wife Amy don’t even seem to like each other, and he contemplates their future.

    From this point on, we follow him having what could only be described as a classic midlife crisis, as he sets off on an impromptu tour of his past acquaintances. Will he write a book? Will he pick up with an ex girlfriend from 30 years ago? Who knows.

    The Rest Of Our Lives is a story told in three long chapters: a beginning, middle and end in the old-fashioned sense. I suppose in that way I could compare it to Seascraper (from Week 5), and I did find a similar sense of doing a spiral and ending up back at the start, as I described after reading that book. But really the one I want to compare it to is all the way back at the start: Universality, from Week 1.

    In comparison to the combative campaigning extremes of the characters in Universality, I found that Tom struggles with the modern world in a rather gentle way, more bemused than angry. Making dad-jokes about pronouns (“Anyway, I started signing off with he/ I mine … I don’t like being referred to in the accusative. It literally objectifies I.”) Flirting with the idea of getting involved in a “reverse racism” lawsuit against the NBA. Things that make me cringe, rather than rage.

    For much of the time the ‘plot’ meanders fairly aimlessly, like Tom on his accidental road-trip to nowhere in particular. He seems lost. The narrative style is meandering, too, thoughts often half-formed and slightly apologetic, as if rambling to oneself in a diary.

    “You reach a certain age,” explains Tom, “and realize, the things you used to take for granted, that everybody you knew and liked agreed on, nobody agrees with you anymore about those things.” “You’re on the wrong side of history,” his son summarises mildly, and Tom capitulates to this immediately and without much fuss: “I guess that’s true.” He seems to me a sympathetic character on this charge, and I imagine a lot of people might find his mild bewilderment at the world of identity politics quite relatable.

  • Week 6: Misinterpretation (Ledia Xhoga)

    “Like seaweed, we floated untethered, without the anchor of intimacies.”

    Misinterpretation is a novel about connection, about how people connect – tenatatively, fragilely, often talking past each other.

    …And, it is also a story about a translator. Which should make it right up my alley. 😊

    The story – told by an unnamed female narrator – begins and ends with Alfred, a troubled Albanian immigrant in New York. Alfred holds some unspoken traumas from his past, is expecting a baby with his wife, and sees visions. Our invisible protagonist is employed as a translator and interpreter, meeting Alfred in a frosty park to take him to the dentist and the psychiatrist’s office.

    The idea of attending therapy via an interpreter already makes me pause for thought here. Having had therapy sessions over the (TERROR)phone a few times during the lockdowns and found it fairly awful, how fascinating to think about trying to do this through a third party – at another remove, with another set of unknown ears in the room listening into one’s trauma, like having a parent listening into a private conversation on the phoneline from downstairs. The exercise creates a false closeness between Alfred and his interpreter, forged of shibboleths and gnostic secrets, and their behaviour with each other quickly crosses professional lines.

    The story continues on in its gentle way through the New York winter, with a brief mid-story interlude in Tirana, Albania. Sinister undertones drift in the margins as our interpreter becomes too involved (can we say: meddles?) in her clients’ and friends’ lives and encounters many dangers slinking around in the shadows, both at home and on the street. I felt the theme of mental health, too, swirling around our characters, and at times I began to wonder if there are really villains following her in the streets, or is our interpreter unable to distinguish dreams from reality?

    For someone who spends so much of her life trying to facilitate mutual understanding, she doesn’t seem to have any close confidants: not the distant violinist friend Anna, not her mother, not the nice Kurdish women she meets at a poetry reading and are immediately scared off by the husband’s behaviour. She seems isolated (in her head?) despite having a social circle. Yet somehow, as the translator, she is also the glue holding people together, the substance of the white space between everyone.

    Interesting, too, that she remains unnamed, perhaps a nod to the invisibility of the translator in art.

    And of course, as a linguist I found the snippets of Albanian language fascinating, with its unfamiliar sounds: “Çdo gjë është e shkruar”.

    The last third of the books feels a bit pedestrian and I admit to losing interest a bit towards the end, but I do wonder if this is one of those Booker nominations which splashes off you at first reading but marinates over a longer period, until I’ll find I’m still thinking about it months or years later. About connection.

    “Of course, I could stop myself. But who was to say that restraint and distance was the best course for everyone? Maybe it was better to blunder, to bump into things, to make ridiculous mistakes, if that brought you closer to yourself and others.”