It is probably time for the Booker Panel, or who ever masterminds the prize, to re-stipulate the criteria for the prize. Clearly it is no longer the best novels published within the time frame – October to September in any given year. October because that is when the Frankfurt Bookfair took place, though I have no idea whether that is still going.
If I Survive You is not even a novel, but clearly a series of stand alone short stories with a wraith of a connection. The characters are a linked family saga, Jamaica, and a house in Miami, which like the family is slowly sinking into the ground.
Jonathan Escoffery writes amusingly about colourism: is Trelawny Black? Clearly his skin tone suggests otherwise, he can pass for Hispanic, but doesn’t speak Spanish, his hair crinkles which is a clue. His roots are undoubtedly Jamaican, but he has never been there. Escoffery writes about absent fathers: Trelawny’s father has gone off with his elder brother Delano, a hurricane destroyed the house, they moved and the father did odd jobs while rebuilding the house, then moved in with his eldest son. There is another absent father, even less kind to his abandoned son, Cukie, by leaving him a second time.
The writing is funny in places, dark in others, extreme sometimes and deadly. But that doesn’t amount to a whole narrative. Each “chapter” could be read on its own, they bear little reference to a previous event or character. I am very unimpressed with this book as an example of the best writing this year.
The definition of multiplex in one sense is: the use of a common communications channel for sending two or more messages or signals. The two books I want to write about do that in ways that are surprising and imaginative, even though I have slightly stretched the meaning of “communication channels”. Though what are books if not communication channels?
To any Guardian reader, Hadley Freeman is a familiar name, she is a regular columnist and is a writer of distinction, wit and interest.
It is probably true that, thanks to the Jewish diaspora, if you pull on any thread in the annals of a Jewish family history an extraordinary story will follow. Thus is was for Hadley Freeman, who decided to write about her grandmother Sala Freiman after her death.
Hadley remembers her grandmother as elegantly and defiantly French even though she was married and lived in America for most of her life. She remembers her grandfather, Bill, as an ebullient, moustachioed gentleman and her grandmother as ‘weird’, this she has decided was because she always looked sad, and sadness in adults is something that children find difficult and a bit frightening.
So when Hadley pulls from the back of a cupboard a dusty shoebox which turns out to be full of papers and photographs, not another pair of stylishly elegant shoes, she realises that there is indeed something to write about.
In House of Glass, Ms Freeman covers a wealth of history that she knew nothing about. Enquiries were difficult, very few surviving members of her family, which she discovered were not French at all but Polish, wanted to talk much about their past and those that did may not have been entirely reliable witnesses.
The book, far from concentrating on Sala Freiman, starts in a shetl called Chrzanow in Poland not fifteen kilometres from its more notorious neighbouring town, Auschwitz. How tragically ironic then that so many of the members of Glahs family and their near relative the Ornsteins should end their days so near to the place where they had begun.
In this fascinating and remarkable story we follow the family through pogrom, flight, survival and success; family rifts and anguish; and patient, but unfounded, trust. Ms Freeman’s great-uncles and aunts and various other branches of the family ended up in Paris, where they thought they were safe. Assimilation was easier for some and stubbornly resisted by others, with vastly differing results.
The threads and secrets that are unraveled for us in this tale of a twentieth-century Jewish family are gripping, brilliant and tragic – what else could they be?
[See A Crossover posted September 22, 2016 – Philippe Sands East West Street]
The other book also focuses on the twentieth-century with the lives of five women who at one time or another lived in London’s Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury.
As anyone who has walked and driven around Bloomsbury knows, the place it littered with Blue Plaques, those circles of interest that flash by with the names of famous or infamous residents. Mecklenburgh Square would have many more if it had not been for serious war damage and the encroachment of Goodenough College which covered the part of the square where Virginia Woolf lived.
The book, Square Haunting, starts in the early 1900s with Hilda Doolittle, who lived at No 44 from February 1916 until March 1918; Dorothy L Sayers lived at the same address from December 1920 until December 1921; Jane Ellen Harrison lived at No 11 from May 1926 until April 1928; Eileen Power lived at No 20 From Janaury 1922 until August 1940 and finally Virginia Woolf (and Leonard) lived at No 37 from August 1939 until October 1940.
Francesca Wade‘s debut biography is a remarkable and through study of these five women and their various contributions to freedom, women’s suffrage and the altered perspective of women’s history which in their various ways in writing and lecturing, these five women sought to change. Although they were not working together, it is astonishing that some many of their ideas and struggles mirrored each other’s lives and struggles and thoughts.
This handsome and outstanding book should be mined for its information as much as its inherent interest to any women who today wants a life beyond the kitchen sink; the fact that such a life is not only possible but normal is very much down to these five women and others like them. By looking at their lives as seen through one place that they all lived, Francesca Wade has brought into focus how extraordinarily modern and free-thinking they were, even though from the photographs in the book one can still see that they were hobbled by long skirts and Victorian attitudes – which they bravely flouted.
deborahjs 