Category Archives: Prize Winner

February 22, 2022 · 2:05 am

Conversations with Friends:

I’m going to start with a quote from a Vox article about Sally Rooney, because I think it captures pretty well my read and sometimes let professionals do their jobs:

The result is that it is now aspirational to be the kind of person who has read Sally Rooney. She is a signifier of a certain kind of literary chic: If you read Sally Rooney, the thinking seems to go, you’re smart, but you’re also fun — and you’re also cool enough to be suspicious of both “smart” and “fun” as general concepts.

Constance Grady, Vox, “The Cult of Sally Rooney” -https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/3/20807728/sally-rooney-normal-people-conversations-with-friends

It doesn’t have to be aspirational. Conversations with Friends is short, totally absorbing and delightful. And the whole time you’ll find yourself asking ‘is this how novels normally sound?’ ‘am I high or is this how narrative reads’ etc Sometimes you may be high. And that’s fine! It reads even better this way. Not that I know.

So in this one it’s a love quadrangle focused on Francis and Nick having an affair, but Francis really loves Bobbi, but Bobbi has a thing for Melissa, Nick’s wife, who he also loves. It’s pretty simple to keep track of in the book because they’re usually in the same room/house and almost always talking explicitly and plainly about what they are thinking or feeling about themselves and the others.

[It’s so refreshing for a character to just be like: this is what I’m thinking! Forget ‘show don’t tell’! Just tell us! It’s a joy!]

And there’s such great stuff on age/coming of age, maternity/parenting and the distance between ideals about not needing money and actually… needing money.

And oh my god the sex scenes are very well written. (sorry, mum!)

In sum: even if you don’t want to be fancy pretentious reader you can read this one because it is just great. And if you do have aspirations for what to talk about at a cocktail party, because those are happening again, read on! (Even though it was written ages ago. Whatever! Some of us arrive late).

Leave a comment

Filed under Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , ,

November 24, 2021 · 3:19 am

Empire of Pain: It Won’t Feel Good (and not just because it is literally very heavy) But A Must Read

I did commit to reading more nonfiction this year, and so in the waning months of 2021 I thought, why not read something cheerful, like a 560 page deep dive into the Sackler family and their obscene greed that brought the world mass marketed pharmaceuticals and Oxycontin and the subsequent hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths?

I didn’t realize when ordering it from the library that it was from the same author, Patrick Radden Keefe, as my previous 2021 nonfiction win, Say Nothing. But happy discovery, as like Say Nothing the writing is ‘novelistic’ in that people (cough characters) are afforded full depth and complicated motivations and that there is a plot that one can latch onto. So no dry, dull non-fiction for this reader. (Sure, sure, I get it, 2021’s experiment has proven that non-fiction is… pretty great. Don’t rub it in, NHFH.)

What this one offers is on the surface a biography of the Sackler family, beginning with the three brothers that found Purdue pharmaceuticals, but chiefly Arthur, who is something of an impossible figure to believe in the range of interests, the maniacal pursuit of them and the ‘success’ he brought in merging the fields of advertising, medicine and drug development. We then follow the subsequent generations of Sacklers and their truly relentless and amoral pursuit of profit over the clear and consistent and unequivocal proof the dangers of their opioid products. The level of corruption within the government and government agencies, of doctors and pharmacies, the collusion and feigned ignorance, it’s all… a lot, and yet, somehow not at all surprising.

The book explores with some complexity the complicity of later generations and what level of involvement within the Sackler business should ‘taint’ a Sackler family member. Or whether benefiting – directly or indirectly – from Sackler profits besmirches the character or actions of an individual family member, some of whom (though not many) were tangential to the direct business dealings.

I especially appreciated the section detailing the work of activist artist, Nan Goldin, and the demonstration of the power of art to unsettle and unseat power. A meta commentary, I’m sure, on the potential of the book to provoke change, of books to make a difference.

2 Comments

Filed under Bestseller, New York Times Notable, Non-fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , ,

October 9, 2021 · 1:57 am

Shuggie Bain: Not a cheerful read, and other true things.

Douglas Stuart’s 2020 Booker Prize Winner, Shuggie Bain, is the sort of fat novel you crawl inside. It’s not particularly plot-y, but it is an entirely realized world of a falling apart family and a boy realizing himself. It opens with fifteen year old Shuggie on his own in a dire rooming house, before flashing back to his years as a young child growing up with his alcoholic mum, Agnes, and his serially cheating dad, Shug. Plus his half-siblings who are busy protecting themselves and his grandparents who blame themselves for Agnes’ behaviour, but aren’t equipped to recognize what needs to be done to protect Shuggie. We leap around in time following Shuggie – and Agnes – as the gay son navigates a world with parents who do little, but are somehow still sympathetic.

With that, the novel unfolds around Shuggie and what we can reasonably hope for his life given what surrounds him. And maybe that’s what makes it such a claustrophobic novel. The sort where you where you know from the opening pages that nothing good will happen. Thatcher’s Glasgow sort of nothing good will happen.

But the writing. It’s such beautiful writing.

So maybe if you’re ready – 2020 was probably not the right time to read it – you could give it a read.

Leave a comment

Filed under Booker Prize, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as ,

October 2, 2021 · 6:26 pm

How Beautiful We Were

Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were is beautiful. I mean, the story is crushing: an American oil company destroys the (fictional) village of Kosawa in an unnamed country in Africa by poisoning the water and land such that the children are dying, the land can’t be farmed, and the villagers must leave or die. Over the forty-odd years it takes to slowly and apathetically destroy the village and its people, the reader witnesses the company and its cooperating government shift from outright denials of the evidence of the environmental ruin to agreement of cause and effect but with a simultaneous decision – supported by law – to do nothing. The reader might think – as the people of Kosawa do – that the swing from denial to consent of crime might result in restitution, but such an expectation, as we should have known, is ridiculous. No one and nothing can hold the powerful to account.

Except? Well, maybe. We do witness Thula, the young heroine of the village, journey to America to study in an aim to save her village and people. With her return to Kosawa and her commitment to lead a peaceful overthrow of the government, the reader begins to hope that maybe some change will come that will restore Kosawa. I won’t totally spoil things for you, but I would say that the novel exploits novelistic structure to build up hope and expectation in ways that are clever, if ultimately frustrating.

The narrative voice shifts among the characters in Thula’s family as we experience from all points of view the ebb of hope and despair, the belief that change might be possible and the acceptance of individual self interest as the most powerful motivator. While it has no connection – at all – to vaccines or the vaccine flap, this thread in the novel – what are we willing to do for the wider good, what are we willing to sacrifice for our communities – did resonate with this reader in thinking about the current moment and the need to see past our own self interest for just. a. second.

The best thing going in the book is the beautiful writing. I did find the plot a bit slow, and the characters a bit sparse in their development. But with the book focusing on the indictment of oil, the call for environmental justice and communal action, and the condemnation of the wealthy and willfully ignorant (like me), I suppose I can deal.

Leave a comment

Filed under Bestseller, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as ,