Good Grief, Eileen

Have you ever read a book that you couldn't put down but you couldn't recommend? I kind of feel that way about Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. It's not that I felt it was a waste of time (to obtain that miserable feeling, read “The Girl on the Train”). Maybe it's closer to the way I felt about “Gone Girl” – these people are all despicable but I can't stop reading. But Eileen isn't despicable, just depressing.

Eileen Dunlop, 23 year old resident of a small coastal Massachusetts town she calls X-ville, is planning to escape from it all – her alcoholic father, her dead-end job at a correctional facility for adolescent boys, her marginal existence – for a new life in New York. And since she narrates from a remove of fifty years, we know she made it. We even know as she begins the story – a week before Christmas – that by Christmas Day she will be gone. And I was certainly rooting for her. But as she piled on detail after detail about her life – her father's abusive insults, her disgust with her own body, her sad workplace crush on a prison guard– I couldn't imagine how she would gain the strength to succeed.  Every time I thought her self-esteem couldn't get any lower, it did.

But then the glamorous and mysterious Rebecca comes to work at the facility, and forms an instant bond with Eileen. Eileen sees her as an escape route, and in an unexpected and shocking way she is. But by that time I was exhausted. Did I really need to endure that much misery to get to a semi-happy ending?

I have to admire Moshfegh’s ability to make a character and story so compelling that I couldn't stop reading. And amazingly I did come to care about what happened to Eileen – as opposed to that stupid girl on the train. But be warned – it's the most disturbing Christmas story you'll ever read.

Best Friends

II resisted as long as I could. I had read about Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, much admired by literary critics and other writers, but I'm always wary of translations, and did I really want to commit to reading all four? But I was intrigued by that fact that in this day when authors seem forced to relentlessly promote their works, the mysterious “Elena Ferrante” (her pen name) has managed to keep her identity a secret and do only the bare minimum of interviews (written only).

I've now finished the first – My Brilliant Friend, and am halfway through the second – The Story of a New Name, and there's no stopping me. The books follow the lives of two childhood friends, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, beginning in postwar Naples, where there is little escape from grinding poverty and limited opportunity. Both girls are bright and ambitious, and they imagine exciting lives for themselves. Although Lila is the stronger, the more imaginative and determined of the two, her parents refuse to educate her past elementary school, so it is Elena, her “brilliant friend” who continues her education, while Lila marries young and seems locked into the life she had hoped to escape. And maybe she ultimately does?? I'm only on book two.

I wonder if part of the reason that Ferrante wants her privacy is that her works seems so autobiographical. Elena and Lila are such vivid characters, with a friendship and a rivalry that is fierce and complex, and all the neighbors (and there a lot of them – the index of characters at the beginning of the book is extremely helpful) are rendered so sharply that they are completely convincing. Was Ferrante taking notes all through her childhood? That's how it feels.

Elena and Lila are strong women, and they are angry, sometimes at each other, often at the world. I have to find out how it all ends.

Norwegian Angst

Surely Norway can't be as depressing as it's depicted by its fiction writers, can it? Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" paints a bleak picture, Jo Nesbø's 'Nordic noir' crime novels are dark and brooding, Per Petterson’s "Out Stealing Horses" is full of melancholy and regret. But Petterson’s newest novel I Refuse is darker still. Just look at the book cover!

It opens in 2006 with a powerful scene of the chance meeting in early morning between Jim and Tommy on a bridge outside of Oslo, where Jim, shabbily dressed, is fishing and Tommy, in a sleek new Mercedes, is on his way to work. The two have not seen each other in over thirty years. Tommy comments obliquely about “the way things can turn out”, and then drives away.

From there the story jumps back in time to 1966 in the small town of Mørk, where the two boys share a friendship forged in part by their loneliness, isolation, lost parents, and, in Tommy's case, domestic violence. The narrative continues to shift back and forth in time between their adolescent years and the day of the bridge meeting. Some passages are told in the first person by Tommy, his sister Siri and Jim; others are told in third person, in a way that is impressionistic but not confusing. Gradually these fragments fill in the events that have shaped their lives, including one that has driven a wedge between them. In some ways they have moved in opposite directions, but both have been scarred by their pasts and share an inability to fully connect with life.

The prose is sometimes taut but sometimes rambles in long sentences (could these have been better translated?). The most powerful and unforgettable scenes occur as the two teenagers are both connected and tested by their friendship. On the other hand, it was distracting to feel as if I needed a map of the Oslo area to follow the detailed driving descriptions.

This is a sad and poignant story and you will have to judge for yourself whether hope remains at the end. But I warn you...it's Norwegian.

Everyday Life

What possessed me? Why did I want to read volume one of a six volume autobigraphical novel, translated from Norwegian, short on plot, frequently described in reviews as boring and banal? But My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard has also generated a firestorm of interest, both in Europe and the US, generating lavish praise from literary figures and bitter criticism from a few unimpressed critics, as well as from family members who objected to Knausgaard's frank depictions.

So, what's it like? It's like being inside someone's head. You're a witness to everything Karl Ove is thinking, from his deeply felt views on art, death, parenthood to his adolescent plotting to obtain beer for a New Year's Eve party. His style is straightforward and reportorial, but not without lyricism. Most of the second half of the book revolves around Knausgaard and his older brother dealing with the aftermath of their father's death. Karl Ove's relationship with his father was difficult, so as he cleans up the mess (literally) that his father has left behind he speaks frankly of his self-doubt and his attempts to come to terms with the loss of this cold, judgmental man.

What makes this book so unusual is Knausgaard's willingness to risk being boring by talking about ordinary, everyday events – a haircut, a cleaning chore, a train ride – without losing the reader's interest, and to examine his life with unsparing honesty. Somehow, it worked for me.

Stages of Life

Late in Tessa Hadley's Clever Girl, main character Stella muses that “the highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you”. She is certainly talking about herself. Each of the book's ten chapters describes what 'befell' Stella in a period of her life, from her childhood with a single mother in postwar Bristol England in the early 1960's, to her own single motherhood and commune life in the 70's, to her married middle age. (If you are a New Yorker reader you may recognize some of the early chapters, which appeared there as short stories). Although Stella can be clever, she is often the victim rather than the driver of her fate. She somehow manages to be impulsive and passive at the same time, and the result is a life that lurches forward with plenty of wrong turns.

I am often annoyed with passive characters (I had that problem with “The Flamethrowers”), but Stella is so clear-eyed and honest about her mistakes that I grew to admire her. Hadley's prose has a lot to do with that. It is crisp and concise, not at all showy, but sharply observant, and by the end incidents that seemed isolated and unconnected form a cohesive portrait.

Stella is not always clever, but she does have the good sense to read great literature to keep her sanity when her life is chaotic. You've got to like a girl for that.

Act II

What if the most exciting part of your life occurs before you're old enough to appreciate it? In some ways that's what happened to Jules Jacobson in Meg Wolitzer's “The Interestings” (See my blog). For Joan Joyce in Maggie Shipstead's Astonish Me it comes when, after she has slavishly devoted her childhood and adolescence to ballet, she is accepted into a company and moves to New York. There she confronts what must be the case for many talented young people – she is very good but she will never be great. And she meets someone who is great – the charismatic Russian dancer Arslan Rusakov. Improbably, he chooses Joan to help him defect, and for a time they are lovers and she can bask in his reflected glory.

But when the relationship inevitably fails, she chooses a very different Act II – marriage to her high school sweetheart, a child, and a new life in a Southern California suburb. As Joan struggles to let go of her perfectionism her husband Jacob struggles to make her content in this new life. When their son displays unusual talent as a dancer, Joan is drawn back into the dance world.

OK, I think I'm making this sound like a soap opera. But it's much more nuanced than that. Shipstead examines some universal themes – hopes and disappointments, ambition and envy. She shows the dangers when parents attempt to live through their children's lives. In addition, although I know only a modest amount about ballet, I thought Shipstead did a terrific job of describing the ballet world – the tedium and physical pain of the endless practice, the subtle but powerful differences between a competent dancer and an electrifying one. She captures the joy and pain of short-lived success at a young age and its long term effects on the life that follows.  

Summer Friendships

Is summer camp a rite of passage? If so, it's one I missed. But for the six characters in Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, the bond they form in the 70's at a summer arts camp informs their lives for the next three decades. For Julie Jacobson, who arrives in camp as a suburban nonentity and leaves as 'Jules' with five sophisticated urban new best friends, the camp experience is especially transformative.

The camp has given them all the sense that they are talented and special, destined for extraordinary lives. In the power center of the six are the Wolf siblings Ash (sister) and Goodman (brother). Children of privilege, charismatic, living in Manhattan, they represent for Jules all that she admires and aspires to. But success comes instead to Ethan, the gawky nerd, when he creates a Simpsons-like animated series that brings him artistic and financial success. His marriage to Ash gives her the money and prestige to create a career in feminist theater.

And Jules is jealous. Wolitzer deftly and humorously explores how friendships evolve when success does not bless all equally. She creates no monsters, but gives each character a believable arc in the journey to maturity. More importantly, Wolitzer tracks the ebb and flow of the friendships over a thirty year span with a nuanced hand. She paints them as complicated, conflicted and, yes, interesting.

All In The Family

If you haven't read anything about Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, that's a good thing. You can jump in and let this story unfold with no preconceptions. If you have read something about this book, and you think you won't like it, I'll urge you to give it a try. A plot that sounds gimmicky or just plain odd when described by a reviewer can be fascinating in the hands of a good writer. (Kate Atkinson's “Life After Life” is a great example of this).

Narrator Rosemary Cooke begins her story in what seems like an odd place – the middle. But this allows her, now in college at Davis, to look back at her five-year-old self in Indiana, and to introduce her family members in a series of flashbacks, each one filling in a little more of the complicated picture. Once again Tolstoy is correct - “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”. As Rosemary reluctantly begins to examine her memories of her childhood with her sister Fern and her brother Lowell, she must confront hard questions about what it means to be human.

Rosemary's narrative is funny, cynical, sharp – a college girl sometimes too smart for her own good. But she asks hard questions of herself and her family members, and the story that slowly unfolds is touching and heartbreaking.

A Year in the Life

Sometimes what leads me to a book is a straight line, sometimes it's a long twisted path, but this time it was somewhere in between. I loved David Mitchell's “Cloud Atlas', so I tried “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” but I just couldn't get into it. So much for David Mitchell, said I. But then I listened to the podcast of the Slate Audio Book Club where they discussed “Cloud Atlas”. (These podcasts are very entertaining, and I loved the latest one where they discussed “”Pride and Prejudice” on the occasion of its 200^th birthday). They enjoyed "Cloud Atlas", but all of them said that their favorite Mitchell book was Black Swan Green, so I decided to try it.

What! Another coming-of-age novel told in the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy? Why I am reading this? But I was hooked immediately. The chapters, each about a month apart, recount episodes in Jason Taylor's life in Worcestershire in 1982 . They don't initially seem to tie together, but they slowly reveal Jason's world and his view of it. He is a sharp observer, perhaps because his stammer makes him wary of talking too much, but also because he is acutely aware of the thin and shifting line that separates a thirteen-year-old from being part of the crowd to being the object of bullying. He has secret aspirations to write poetry, and some of his prose reflects his attachment to the lyric and mystical in nature. But he can also be snarkily funny, keenly observant of the odd characters that are part of small town life, and sharply critical of his parent's crumbling marriage.

If you've been put off by complicated, mannered style of Mitchell's previous works, I highly recommend that you spend a year with Jason Taylor.

Commune Life

If you're old enough to remember an era of history does it make a novel about that time more interesting for you? Or do you just get annoyed because the author has gotten some details wrong? In the case of Lauren Groff's Arcadia it's neither for me. Although I remember the 60's and 70's, I have no idea if she got the details right because I have no idea what life was like if you joined a commune. But I admit I've always been curious.

The story is seen through the eyes of Bit (Ridley Sorrel Stone), child of commune members Abe and Hannah, who live in a bread truck in the sprawling commune Arcadia somewhere in upstate New York. In the book's four sections Groff shows us Bit at pivotal times in his life: at five, at fourteen, in his twenties and approaching fifty. The commune is not painted in idyllic tones, but in the early sections it's easy to see Bit's love of the beauty of nature, even as he struggles to understand the adults around him. His turbulent adolescence is mirrored in the turbulence and discord within the group itself. And as an adult he and other commune members struggle to fit into life outside Arcadia.

But Groff isn't just telling a story about the effects of commune life. She is ultimately telling a story about families, and she creates an array of complicated, flawed but believable characters. Her beautiful descriptions of nature combined with her sensitive portrayal of the evolution of a family made this an interesting read for me.

The Unreliable Narrator

Why did I think Julian Barnes was a difficult read? I don't remember much about “Flaubert's Parrot”, but I seem to remember that I struggled to get through it. So I approached his latest book The Sense of an Ending with some trepidation. But it had just won the Booker prize and was only 176 pages long, so I decided to try him again.

I could have read this book in one big gulp. The first section is a coming of age story, as Tony Webster recounts his memories of his high school and college days – his youthful friendships and his first romance - “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.”

In the second section an unexpected letter causes sixty-something Tony to look back on his life and re-examine his memories - “we live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time”. Sorry to keep quoting, but Barnes puts things so succinctly that there's no point in paraphrasing. Tony struggles to unravel the mystery that the letter presents, and in the process he must deal with his own delusions and guilt. 

 

This is a book about how our memories shape us and how they deceive us, how our emotions color our interpretations of events. Barnes does a masterful job of creating a character who is forced to spin his memories over and over before they finally show him the truth.

I Love Baseball

Yes, I do love baseball. So I'm sure I would have enjoyed Chad Harbach's first novel The Art of the Fielding anytime of year, but it is especially enjoyable to be reading it during the World Series. Last night I watched Texas Rangers shortstop Elvis Andrus make a play that Harbach's hero Henry Skrimshander would surely have admired.

“The Art of the Fielding” is also the name of the dog-eared book that Henry studies and reveres. Written by a Hall of Fame shortstop named Aparicio Rodriguez, the books dispenses wisdom such as “The shortstop is a source of stillness in the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond”. And that pretty well defines Henry, a freakishly talented and graceful shortstop . His arrival on the baseball team at a small Wisconsin college called Westish propels the Harpooners, so named because Melville briefly visited the school on a book tour, from mediocrity to improbable success. Henry and his best friend, catcher and team captain Mike Schwartz, form a powerful alliance of hard work, loyalty and dedication to baseball, generously sprinkled with the literary references that Mike supplies for every occasion.

Harbach clearly loves baseball and I hope that even non-fans will appreciate his ability to describe the beauty and the grit of a baseball game.  But this book is not just the baseball equivalent of “Hoosiers”. He is tackling big topics – friendship, failure and redemption, first loves (both gay and straight), errors made both on and off the field. It's about coming of age, and there's a little Ahab in each of the characters as they deal with their own versions of the elusive white whale. 

PS Harbach was no doubt tipping his hat to Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio with the first name of his fictional author, and I guess the last name could be an homage to the many players with the last name of Rodriguez. But I prefer to believe he was thinking of hardworking catcher Pudge (much like Mike Schwartz) rather than pretty-boy A-Rod.

Exiles

Should I read this book? I often have trouble deciding that. In this case, the arguments in favor included that fact that the author was the 2008 Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. On the other hand, I'd never heard of him. Not really surprising - I've never heard of several of the recent Literature prize winners: Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Imre Kertész, just to name a few. The Nobel Committee has been accused of becoming too Eurocentric and increasingly esoteric.

Also, I'm always hesitant to read a novel in translation because you are at the mercy of the translator. Am I really experiencing the prose as the author intended it, or is the translation too literal or badly mangled? But the book had been recommended to me so I forged ahead.

Wandering Star tells the coming of age story of two young girls. The first is Esther, a secular Jewish girl who is forced to leave her French mountain village in the waning days of World War II in order to escape the Germans. Eventually she and her mother reach the newly established state of Israel. The second is Nejma, an orphaned Palestinian girl, who is displaced by the partitioning of her country. The girls encounter each other for only one brief moment on a road, as Esther and her fellow refugees are moving toward Jerusalem, and Nejma is moving away from it.

The story Le Clézio tells has nothing to do with politics. He describes in simple prose these two 'wandering stars', young women searching for peace and acceptance in the midst of war and profound human misery. The book's dedication - “To the captured children” - expresses his empathy for both his characters.   In the midst of fear and deprivation each is still able to appreciate the beauties of nature and each remains open to love and human kindness.

Summer Vacation

Summer Vacation – what an evocative phrase. We all have memories from our childhood and adolescence of that long stretch of days that opened up before us on the last day of school. I always thought that the light in my grade school classroom looked different on that final day – more golden. And if, like me, you grew up in a city, and your summer vacation included an escape to the beach, you probably remember the pleasure of that simpler, lazier existence.

That's the feeling Colson Whitehead captures in his novel Sag Harbor. Sag Harbor is first of all a real place – a small community in the Hamptons, populated in summer mainly by the families of African American professionals who own vacation homes there, many of them built or purchased by their grandparents' generation in the 1930's and 40's. But for Whitehead's fifteen year old hero Benji Cooper, Sag Harbor is also a state of mind, an escape from the world of his elite, mostly white, Manhattan prep school to a place where he hopes to reinvent himself as a cooler, more confident version of his old self. His parents visit only on occasional weekends, so Benji, his brother Reggie and their pals have plenty of space to experiment with cool handshakes, new haircuts and BB guns.

Was Whitehead taking notes when he was fifteen? His characters seem seem so true in every detail, and the humor bubbles up on every page. He's not attempting to describe a 'special summer' where some traumatic event causes a boy to become a man. Instead he gets inside of Benji's head as he wryly observes life in Sag Harbor, and attempts to figure out who he's going to be, who he wants to be. It's funny and touching with a just a hint of melancholy.

Russian Coincidence

I am currently reading “The Madonnas of Leningrad” (see Dorothea's blog) for our Book Club in August, a story that takes place during the siege of Leningrad. But I always like to have at least two books going at once, so if I get bogged down or bored by one I can switch to the other. So I picked a second book by a roundabout method. I loved the movie “The 25^th Hour”, a gritty story set in New York directed by Spike Lee with a great performance by Edward Norton. The movie was based on David Benioff's book, and Benioff also wrote the screenplay. So I chose his latest book City of Thieves, thinking it would be another gritty, urban story. And in a way it is. But the city is not New York, and the time is not the present. The city of thieves in the title is ...Leningrad and the time is 1941. What are the odds?

City of Thieves is sort of the novelistic equivalent of a 'buddy movie'. But in a good way. The unlikely buddies are Lev, a scrawny Jewish seventeen-year-old who has remained in the embattled city in the hopes of defending his country and proving his manhood, and Kolya, a handsome, boastful, charismatic Red Army soldier who looks like an Aryan poster boy. They meet in a jail cell where both fear they are about to be executed. But instead their lives are spared and they are given a perilous assignment by the secret police. Their task will take them from the dangerous streets of Leningrad to even greater danger behind enemy lines. There are gun battles, close calls, brutality, struggles against the relentless cold of the Russian winter, a high stakes chess game. Does this sound grim? Actually, it's not. In fact there are parts, especially in the dialog between Lev and Kolya, that are downright funny.

Benioff is a terrific story-teller. You barely have time to catch your breath after one close call before you're hurtled into the next one. But he also captures well the conflicting emotions of Lev, who narrates the tale, as he comes to grips with his fears, his curiosity and his grudging bond with Kolya. This book is a little dark to recommend as a 'beach read', although the descriptions of long,cold marches through the snowy Russian forests might cool you off on hot day. But I can definitely recommend it as a fast-moving, page-turning thriller with sharp insights on the complex bonds of friendship.

Horse Sense

You know how some children love reading books about horses – “The Black Stallion”, “My Friend Flicka”, “Misty of Chincoteague”? Well, I was never one of those kids. Too much of a city girl, I guess. I couldn't see the point of reading about horses as long as Nancy Drew was still solving new mysteries. So Aryn Kyle's The God of Animals was not an obvious choice for me. But it had one of the best first lines I'd read in a long time: “Six months before Polly Cain drowned in the canal, my sister, Nona, ran off and married a cowboy”. So I decided to try it.

The book is narrated by twelve-year-old Alice Winston, who lives on a rundown horse farm in Colorado with her stoic, hard-working father Joe and her severely depressed mother. (When asked to describe her mother, Alice simply says, “She's sad”.) With her seventeen-year-old sister Nona gone, Alice is left to help her father make ends meet on the struggling farm. To do this he teaches riding to an enthusiastic but untalented rich girl, and allows wealthy, idle female neighbors to board their horses in his barn. Joe pays little attention to Alice, so she spends a lot of time inside her own head, trying to figure out the adults around her. To Kyle's credit these adults are portrayed as complex three-dimensional characters. But it is often hard to believe that a twelve-year-old, even one with an old soul, could make the adult-like observations that Alice does. What's more realistic is her discovery of the cruelty that adults are capable of inflicting, and her realization that she can be cruel as well.

Kyle's descriptions of the stark desert scenery and brutal heat are powerful. Even more powerful are some of the scenes involving horses, including the frank descriptions of separating foals from their mares and the 'breaking' of a spirited horse. This book addresses some dark themes: depression, dysfunctional families, the seduction of money, unfaithfulness, the isolation of adolescence. So I can't recommend it as a 'beach read' or a book for horse lovers. But it is a thoughtful coming-of-age novel by a talented writer.

Completely Pointless and Beautiful

That's Tim Winton's description of surfing in his new novel Breath. I hadn't intended to read another coming-of-age novel so soon but I happened to see Winton's book on the New Fiction shelf at the library and remembered enjoying his “Cloudstreet” long ago. Winton is an Australian, and the main story, told in flashback, takes place in the small town of Sawyer in western Australia in the late 60's. Eleven year old Bruce Pike (“Pikelet”) and his twelve year old friend Ivan Loon (“Loonie”) have little in common, but they share a love of adventure in the forests and rivers of Sawyer. One favorite pastime is diving to the bottom of the river and holding their breath as long as possible. (“We scared people, pushing each other harder and further until often as not we scared ourselves”.), This is the first and most obvious reference to the title, but the notion of breath plays out in more dangerous ways as the story progresses.

The ocean is only a short distance from their mill town, but Pikelet's parents are afraid of it and Loonie's father, who owns a bar, is oblivious to it. But the ocean is a seductive presence for the adventurous boys, especially when they discover surfing. And even more seductive is Sando, a veteran international surfer who lives by the ocean and surfs with a grace and passion that the boys admire. They become his acolytes. Initially he is their teacher and guru, but gradually he begins to push them to surf in riskier and riskier situations. At the same time his wife Eva makes it clear that she can barely tolerate their presence.

I loved Winton's spare but lyrical descriptions of the exciting, harrowing thrills of surfing, as well as its beauty. It's easy to see why the lonely boys were so quickly addicted to it. But what happens when a boy is seduced by the attentions of powerful adults? When he is convinced that taking risks is the key to becoming extraordinary? That's the question Winton tackles. The two boys discover different answers, but both are powerfully and permanently affected by their childhood experiences.

Coming of Age

The Coming of Age novel is a genre with which we're probably all familiar. I think immediately of books like “Great Expectations”, “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Huckleberry Finn”, books in which the main character, a child or young adult, experiences adventures, conflicts or revelations which profoundly affect his passage into adulthood. Sometimes these experiences occur within the confines of the family itself, but other times outside events intrude on the child's life. In Hisham Matar's debut novel In The Country of Men, set in Libya in 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman, the first person narrator, understands nothing of the politics of Muammar Gaddafi's totalitarian regime. But he sees its effects on the lives of his parents and friends,

Matar is very effective in portraying the workings of a nine-year-old mind. Suleiman is confused and angry, stung by the lies his parents tell him, frightened by political interrogations he sees on television, uncertain where his loyalties should lie. As a result he commits a series of betrayals. It would certainly have been more dramatic, even cinematic, for him to commit a single dramatic betrayal and then be wracked with the guilt for the rest of the book. Matar's choice is much more nuanced and poignant. Suleiman is ashamed of his actions in the moment, uncertain of his motives, but then seems to file them away as he is forced to tackle yet another confusing and frightening event.

I also admired Matar's portrait of Suleiman's mother Najwa as seen through nine-year-old eyes. Although the boy is confused by the effect the 'medicine' his mother drinks has on her, his description gives us a vivid picture of a woman struggling with her anger at being forced into an arranged marriage and her terror that her husband's political activities will threaten her family.

And throughout the book Matar contrasts the blinding white light of the Libyan sun with the stifling darkness inside Suleiman's home as its frightened inhabitants pull their curtains closed.

This book is a poetic and powerful indictment of the corrosive and permanent effect of public violence and terror on the life of a child.