Tag: Literary fiction

Books: Look What You Made Me Do, A Novel by John Lanchester

It is a pleasure read and it gives you the feeling it was written for pleasure by John Lanchester. Inspires me to read more of his writing. Maybe, next one on my to read list will be his most famous novel Capital.

The plot is engaging as all revenge stories are. Closer to the end, it becomes predictable and a bit repetitive. Not all plot twists need to be explained as the narrator Kate does…But the plot meanderings are not the main source of the pleasure of reading. It is the language – incisive and witty. Lanchester has the gift of capturing and representing truthfully the class and age of his characters by rendering their conversations – intellectual discourse, dinner banter, intimate dialogue. He makes you reflect on the nature of willful or just fashionable socializing, of courtship and friendship, of passion and jealousy – through language. Kate, one of the two main narrators in the novel gets plunged into misery by witnessing her most intimate marital discourse becoming the dialogue of a popular TV show. Phoebe – the second narrator, pleases most with her cynical and blunt descriptions of her manipulative and deeply unhappy mother Sarah.

The other feature of this novel that contributes greatly to the pleasure of reading it is the deeply amoral nature of its characters (but they are all super intelligent). There are no “nice” people in this book (except for probably Phoebe’s partner). Thus the book, never gets didactic. It just follows the domino effect of people’s egotistical behavior – the effect of “look what YOU made me do”. Everybody is “innocent” as the ending suggests. It is other people that make us behave badly and Lanchester’s point is that this bad behavior is quite enjoyable. The characters just can’t help it.

The description of the Oxford students’ love triangle was great. The seventies atmosphere, the college culture, the excitement of complex and playful but in the end life-defining relationships – all captured so well! Makes you realize how the act of “falling in love” breakes all the rules of decency and has nothing to do with morality or generosity of spirit.

Books: Flesh, A Novel by David Szalay, 2025

Somewhat disappointing for a Booker-nominated novel! But aren’t they all recently?

Szalay tracks in a coldly observant style the life of a boy from behind the Iron Curtain who is sexually abused by a 40-something woman, the age of his mother. The boy becomes obsessed with the older woman, which leads to the accidental murder of her husband. From now on, things go downhill for the main character – although on the surface, his life trajectory is quite successful, financially, socially, and sexually. We follow Istvan, who leads a life as an “out of body” experience, unable to fully engage emotionally with his female partners. On the other hand, we see him capable of deep hatred – towards his stepson, and deep love – towards his own child. Istvan is not just an unsympathetic character. He develops into quite a monstrous person, and despite his overwhelming unhappiness, he never appeals to the compassion of the reader.

If Szalay’s intention was to show the effects of a totalitarian society and its sexually and socially frustrating system on a generation of people who got to experience the collapse of this system, the result is quite unsatisfactory. Istvan’s story could be anybody’s story. The author seems to have little, if any, knowledge of life behind the Iron Curtain.

If Szalay’s intention was to show the effects of childhood sexual trauma on the life of an innocent boy, this has already been done by Ian McEwan in “Lessons” (2022) in a most brilliant way.