Tag: novel

Books: What We Can Know, A Novel by Ian McEwan, 2025

The novel offers variations of all possible answers to the question “What can we know?” The answers, as expected, are pessimistic. In a world overwhelmed with data and a digital cloud heavy with “knowledge” about everyone and everything, it is still possible to manipulate memory and history as we struggle to “know”. “Most of life is oblivion,” one of McEwan’s characters argues. The truth about the past is unattainable, as it is controlled by the living and by what they have decided to pass on. We can’t know ourselves or what we are capable of. Memoirs are misleading as we put our “better selves” on the page. In a dystopian post-catastrophic world, an age metaphorically named by McEwan – the Inundation (think climate change of catastrophic proportions), humanities and history are losing the attention of the young. The generation of the future is obsessed with the present. Still, a nostalgic professor from the 22nd century searches for a lost poem recited at a birthday party in 2014. This search reflects the author’s hope that literature will still matter…

While the first part of the novel takes place in the future and centers on the search for the lost poem, the second is a soliloquy of the woman to whom the poem was dedicated. It is the more captivating and emotionally engaging part. Here, the novel becomes a satire of sorts of a poet-genius and his literary circle. The poet suffers from “status anxiety” and “limited forgiveness for humankind,” and McEwan so detests him that he turns him into a murderer. Or did he have to do this because he needed to introduce some thriller element to his otherwise quite essayistic narrative?

Stylistically, McEwan is at the height of his craft; his message is melancholic and ironic.

Books: Heart the Lover, A Novel by Lily King, 2025

What an exquisite tear-jerker, impossible not to love! It is the perfect story about a love triangle, the choices we make in our youth, and the blurred line between love and friendship…

The novel follows three college friends, all passionately devoted to literature. It abounds in literary references as the characters spar, debate, crack jokes, and dissect their lives in an effort to impress one another. The narrator is in love with a boy whose closest friend is also in love with her. The first relationship eventually collapses, and the friend becomes her lover. He fathers a child with her but does not learn of it until his deathbed. He dies holding her hand, while her former boyfriend keeps vigil nearby. Stripped down to its bare plot, the story could easily sound like a soap opera. Yet one quickly realizes that “soap” does not define a novel as long as it is not part of its expression.

The reader gets immersed in the story of the girl as it is told by her – a reflection on growing up, a sensual narrative full of happy moments, dominated by the anticipation of happiness and future fulfilment that is only possible in youth, as well as by pain—pain that youth alone allows us to overcome. Even as the novel ends with death, the reverse perspective on time lived has a healing effect.

The entire book is illuminated by a line from The Aeneid, quoted twice: “Someday we will remember even these hardships with pleasure.” That very pleasure flows through the narrative, making the novel so profoundly moving.

Books: The Casual Vacancy. A Novel by J.K. Rowling, 2012

A nice flow of classical prose reminiscent of Dickens (less brilliant though). A tale of two cities divided by class and race. Characters are introduced with their physical characteristics, usually suggestive of their class and moral potential. The action unfolds slowly, tugged forward by small, mundane events that define the everyday life of a community – work, school, child-parent relationships, first love, partnerships, neighbors, envy, ambitions, heartbreak, etc. Sentimental strings are pulled, tragedy and regret abound, nothing can’t be overcome… Post-catastrophe, an optimistic veil drops over reality.

The novel’s episodic structure makes it suitable material for a TV series.

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.

Books: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Novel by Satoshi Yagisawa

What is the appeal of a Japanese novel of 150 pages that makes it an international bestseller? The novel is very unpretentious and uneventful with a very light plot and still a page-turner.

The narrative takes you through the ordinary lives of ordinary people with a low horizon of expectations from life – nothing beyond love, work, and family. A hike in the mountains is described so simply and effortlessly that it has the effect of a still-life painting. It focuses your gaze and sucks you into the reality of the everyday made to look mysterious and strange through the power of language. It makes the coolness of the night breeze or the fatigue and excitement of a mountain climb acquire a fresh deep meaning.

There is a lot of melodrama but it is so mellow and tender that creates a sub-genre of its own. Let us call it – the mellow-drama. The painful is combined with hope, death is not an end.

Books: All the Lovers in the Night, a Novel by Mieko Kawakami, 2022, originally published in Japanese 2011

My first experience of Mieko Kawakami’s writing, a novelist and poet from Osaka. Very impressive talented prose! The first half of the novel is a fascinating in-depth description of excruciating loneliness.

A socially awkward Fuyuko, the protagonist, a proofreader by profession, finds it extremely hard to communicate with people. She discovers that having a drink helps. Slightly ironic and hurtfully honest, the narrative progresses through the daily ordeals of being alone. Proofreading becomes a metaphor for a specific attitude to life – reading without really getting into the content of the book but just looking for the errors in it… Another topic that is developed intricately to reach metaphorical power is the physical aspect of light and color. Kawakami’s descriptions of the mundane sometimes reach Knausgaardian dimensions.

The “female condition” is represented in several well-written scenes – the protagonist examining the shelves of a modern bookstore self-help section, her first sexual experience, her conversations with two female friends – the “happily married with children” one, and the “sleeping around fashionista.” Kawakami is not interested in making judgments, she is recording the female tragi-comedy in a cool incisive style.

The second half of the novel, with the appearance of a love interest, is more banal as a story because it is seasoned with the hope of happiness for the main character. And the hope of happiness takes a trivial form, promising the reader an American rom-com finale. But no, Kawakami is not providing one. An appropriate ending for a novel like this is finding strength to triumph over disappointment.