THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY – Claire Messud


“This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or
bad – rather both good and bad – but that was not the point. Above all, they
had been, for so long, wildly curious. Just to see, to experience all that
could deny, to set foot anywhere, to speak to anyone, taste anything, to learn,
to know.”



I had such high hopes for book six on my Booker journey.  Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful
History (W.W. Norton & Company 2024), a family saga that spans from
1927 Algeria to 2010 Connecticut, was predicted to be pretty high on my list of
longlist favorites. And it’s proving to be my biggest disappointment.



The theme for this year seems to be very pretty writing and
not a lot of meat.  And surprisingly in
this novel that was inspired by Messud’s own family, there isn’t much heart. This
is a difficult review because I should have loved this, but I didn’t and it hurts
my feelings a little bit.



So why didn’t I like it? 
The snapshots we get that rotate through various family members are too
brief a vignette to create any attachment. In fact, they frequently showcase characteristics
that make these family members unlikeable. The best and what I thought was the most
promising was the opening in Algeria in 1940 with eight-year-old Francois
writing a letter to his father, a French naval attaché, as the Germans took
France. This brief section sets the scene for Francois, his younger sister, Denise,
and his parents, Gaston and Lucienne. And then we frog hop 13 years to Francois
studying in Massachusetts. It’s a bit of whiplash and  a great disappointment.  Where are the missing years?  I want the missing pages! And we get a bit of
him in college, of visiting Cuba, then FLASH, we’re moving on and the reader is
left holding a snapshot and wanting the rest.

In addition to the jarring reading experience, the
characters are so unlikeable – in particular, Barbara, Francois’s wife, who has
to get dementia to be nice.  And then she’s
only nice to her dying husband because she doesn’t know who he is. The telling
scene for me is when they were newly weds and he calls her and tells her how
much he loves her and he just wants her to say it back – she won’t.  Just like over the decades, he wants her to
take his hand, but she doesn’t.  He’s no
prize either as an adult, but she is just distasteful to him, his parents, and
his sister. This love/hate she has for his family isn’t fully explored.  But then again, nothing is explored.



Identity and the disconnect of being Algerian and French and
not seemingly fitting in anywhere is a heavy theme through the novel, in
particular Francois’s sections (and his father’s), but with this storytelling technique,
it never gets a lot flesh.



Meh. 



Booker Count: 6 of 13.



 



 



HEADSHOT – Rita Bullwinkel

“The coaches really are useless, like stoned older brothers getting paid by their parents to chaperone a middle school dance.”

“Beating someone at something that matters more to them than anything is like squashing a fly. You can see the guts of a fly after it’s been smashed.”

Next up on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist is another slim volume, this time a debut, and let me just say it rocked me. Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot is unassuming in its brilliance, and the novel about eight teenage girl boxers competing at the 12th Annual Daughters of America Cup packs a serious punch.  Much like Orbital, this is a novel where the reader is mostly in the headspace of each girl while they fight, and the novel is sectioned off by matches as we spend two days with the girls in the ring for the 7 fights.  The girls are very different, but there is a hunger and similarity in each swing of the fist, each drop of blood, each blooming bruise.

In addition to getting insight into what drives these children to want to pummel each other (from sibling rivalry, to attention, to anger, to just trying to find something they can see themselves in), we get a brutal and honest view of women’s sports.  These girls are the best of the best at what they do and this is to determine who is the best of them.  Yet the tournament is in some run-down gym, there is no hype, no spectators, no cameras, and the judges and coaches are all a bunch of men who can’t really be bothered with girl sports. Despite this, these girls pour their everything into the fights.

My favorite portions of the novel are the brief snippets worked into the bloody fights of who these girls grow up to become, how boxing and the tournament impacted their lives, what their lives look like. From a wedding planner to a gym owner, a PI to someone who works in college admissions, a grocery store manager to an actress, a wine distributer to a pharmacist – these eight girls grow up, and we get to see it – all the blood, guts and glory of these talented and competitive girls who fight as if everything depends on it.  Because it does.

What a startling and stunning blood and spit soaked debut.

Read this book.

Booker count: 5 of 13

ORBITAL – Samantha Harvey

“Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.”

“There’s a lingering sense of an unfinished dream, something wild in his thoughts.”

The Booker train is certainly off to a roaring start, and I think this may be the first year I complete the longlist before the winner is announced.  I won’t finish before the shortlist is announced on 9/16 because the Richard Powers story won’t be published until the end of September (in both the UK and the US), but hopefully that will be the only outstanding novel from the list.  In addition to the two I already owned, I purchased four (one that my library doesn’t carry).  The other half of the Booker Dozen are coming from my local library and dependent upon the holds coming in.  But I will have certainly read the list before the winner is announced, and that makes me very happy.

Book four of my 2024 Booker journey was Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Grove Press 2023).  It’s a slim little love letter to space and earth, but it is very much a novel of being in someone’s headspace; it’s heavy on thought, little on action. I think that Booker lists often reflect the prior year’s list, and this novel certainly did bring to mind the space portion of In Ascension.  It was  lot of the same of being in the crew’s head, their routine and rather mundane daily activities, their health concerns, their studies, and the loved ones they left behind.  The crew is larger in Orbital and the novel doesn’t just stick with one crew member, but I did feel a bit like I’d just picked up In Ascension again.

I’m going to sound like a broken record when I say that the writing is beautiful, but it is.  I’ve never read Harvey before.  I know she’s been longlisted previously for a 2009 work.  (She’s one of four authors from the 2024 longlist who are repeaters.)  The exquisite writing oozes that Booker type.  These very pretty books are usually low on my list of favorites when I read, but I can appreciate the talent in the story.

My favorite part of Orbital is this overall idea that after 9 months in this sardine can floating in space, they will be born back into a life where they are grounded.  And every last one of them seems to dream of going home where they know they will dream of being in space.  The smaller detail that I really gravitate to, and what gives this novel its heart, is Chie, who is mourning the loss of her mother.  From her not wanting to return to earth because in space she can pretend her mother is still alive to her thinking about the bone picking ceremony, it’ll squeeze at your heart.  Another favorite is the crew being from multiple nationalities, including some that are not friendly to each other, having this “space family” flying over an earth wherein they see no boundaries, no borders.

This is probably my least favorite of the four I’ve read thus far, and if this ends up being my lowest ranked book from the list, then that was a damn fine list.

Booker Count: 4 of 13

HELD – Anne Michaels

“Stories told on a battlefield, on a life raft, in a hospital ward at night. In a café that will disappear before morning. Someone overhears. Someone listens, attentive with all his heart. No one listens. The story told to one who is slipping into sleep, or into unconsciousness, never to wake.  The story told to one who survives who will tell that story to a child, who will write it down in a book, to be read by a woman in a country or a time not her own. The story told to oneself… What we give cannot be taken from us.”

My third read from the  2024 Booker longlist was Anne Michaels’s Held (Knopf 2024, in the UK Bloomsbury 2023).  Held is a quick read that is more akin to poetry than a novel, and its stories dance across timelines and locales, quick and light,  weaving in and out of memories in a saga of love and loss and longing.

The novel starts on a battlefield in 1917, where John has been wounded and, unable to move, finds warmth in a sensual memory of his wife and their life of domesticity, a life he is so eager to return to.  Theirs is a beautiful love story (the cover of the UK is a tribute to their love), and the stories that unravel from that moment are also beautiful.

It’s a really short novel and a review runs the risk of ruining beautiful moments, so I am keeping this brief. (How many times can I say ‘beautiful’?)

This is a novel for the poets and dreamers, the romantics.  As for me, I wanted more.  More of the words.  More of the stories.  More flesh on the bones of a memory, of a love, that keeps surviving.

The judges said they wanted heart.  Held certainly delivers there, even if I’m not as smitten with it as others.

Booker Count: 3 of 13

MY FRIENDS – Hisham Matar

“Friend. What a word. Most use it about those they hardly know. When it is a wondrous thing.”

The 2024 Booker Prize longlist was announced on July 30th. Of the official “Booker Dozen,” I’d read only one: Percivall Everett’s James.  (Feel free to look back for that review.)  Prior to the announcement, I’d read an interview with the judges wherein they indicated that what they were looking for most in making their selections were books with heart. Having now read three of the thirteen, I’m becoming increasingly excited for this long list.

In 1984, armed men opened fire from inside the Libyan Embassy in London, turning submachine guns on a crowd of demonstrators protesting Qaddafi’s reign.  Many in attendance were students. An officer was killed.  Hisham Matar’s My Friends is the story of three Libyan men, students and scholars, who were at the demonstration and how their friendship, defined by the demonstration and exile, grew and changed over decades.

Khaled is our narrator, and the novel opens in 2016  with him seeing his friend Hosam off.  Hosam and his family are heading to California and new beginnings.  After Khaled drops him off at the station, he walks back to his flat, his feet retracing the steps that had led them to that point.  Khaled had first met Hosam in 1995, but their history does go back further. Hosam was a well-known author, and Khaled had been hoping to meet him for years – even before he went to Edinburgh to study. And unbeknownst to Khaled for many years, Hosam was also at the demonstration.

The novel then takes us further back to Mustafa, a fellow classmate that Khaled met in 1983.  It is Mustafa who takes him to the demonstration in London where they are both shot and become exiled from their home and families.  They become as close if not closer than brothers.  A decade later, Hosham becomes part of the friend group, much to Mustafa’s dismay.  And later, Hosham and Mustafa have a relationship closer than Khaled could have imagined possible.

My Friends is a novel about truly never being able to go home again and trying to build a world you’re okay in.  It’s about growing up and growing apart.  It’s about seeing our heroes as fallible, and building our friendships around that.  It’s about surviving when rootless and bleeding in a street.

Khaled’s repeated search for belonging, for safety, for something stable while also wanting to go home, the nervous condition being in exile has created in him, is just wonderfully done; it’s simply a gorgeous novel that is full of heart.  I can see why it made the list

Read this book.

Booker Count: 2 of 13

PRAISEWORTHY – Alexis Wright

“A magic donkey could rip your heart out and make you go wild, if it knew you had an overwhelming desire to own it, and knew that you would do anything to capture its power.”

“She is the prisoner of the ghosts and trapped inside her house.”

“… of course he knows that Aboriginal Sovereignty is not dead, and could never die – just sometimes, seen differently, as though having sprouted from the ground, grown out of a multi-consciousness, wearing multiple ancestries with the same religiousness of country, atmosphere, cosmos, stars, heavens, lands, seas, flora and fauna, deep inside, where the law of silence in the bush reigned, or sometimes, storms rose with hazes of butterflies.”

While researching possible selections for the 2024 Booker Prize, I routinely heard buzz about Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing 2023).  (I actually don’t think it was eligible for the prize this year.) While the political allegory of a tome did not make the cut for the Booker, it has been awarded numerous other awards (Praiseworthy is apparently quite praiseworthy), and I decided to add it to my Booker stack anyway.  Over 600 pages later, I’m not sure if I should have.

Praiseworthy is a fictional town in north Australia, and it’s a bit of an ecological nightmare and home to the ancestors.  The novel, a lyrical bit of political allegory, bleeds and screams against oppression, greed, and assimilation.  In many ways, the novel reminds me of a former Booker longlist selection, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory.  Incidentally, the word “glory” makes repeated appearances in both novels.  Unlike Glory, I found this novel far too long and honestly a bit dull – at least for the first quarter.  It does pick up about halfway through.

There are some fantastic parts to this novel and those parts are stunningly done.  Very long story short, a haze has settled over Praiseworthy, and the government will not help. Cause Man Steel is trying to find a magical donkey to launch a donkey transport business and save everyone from fossil fuels.  His wife, Dance, tries to escape his single-minded madness by studying butterflies and moths.  (She is frequently called moth-er, which I LOVE.) His eldest son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, is seen as a great hope, but he is trying to kill himself.  Cause Man’s youngest son, Tommyhawk, hates his parents and his brother and wants to be adopted by the government and become white.  The focus of the second half is Tommyhawk reporting his brother for pedophilia (Ab. Sov. has an arranged betrothed who is still technically a minor) and the punishment he receives at the hands of the police, followed by him walking out into the sea never to be seen from in Praiseworthy again.

The reappearing use of butterflies and moths is my favorite aspect of the novel.  From the brown butterfly then send south to request governmental aid (it comes back singed) to the police assuming “butterflies” means something to do with drugs, to the butterflies falling dead from the sky and landing on the back of puppy dogs, to the roar of the butterflies demanding they want Aboriginal Sovereignty back – it’s lovely.

As a whole, the book is far from my favorite, but I can see why it’s gotten the attention it has.

Read this book.  But, word of caution, there’s a lot of words to weed out to get to the meat, which is quite tasty.

HAPPY MEDIUM – Sarah Adler

Gretchen Acorn, a fake spiritual medium (a hustler with a heart of gold), gets paid 10k by a wealthy client to “cleanse” a goat farm of a pesky (and pervy)  ghost.  The goat farm belongs to the client’s bridge partner, so Gretchen is expecting an older gentleman that she can hustle into thinking she’s solved him of his ghost.  She’s not expecting the tattooed, gorgeous grump of man who sees right through her smoke and mirrors. But in a surprising twist, Gretchen can see and talk to the goat farm’s resident ghost, Everett Waybill.  (No one is really more surprised than her at this turn of events.) Now she has to convince the owner, Charlie Waybill, that not only is the ghost real, but the ghost is tied to a curse that puts Charlie’s life at risk.

Sarah Adler’s Happy Medium (Berkley Romance) is quirky and cute – a fluffy read that is fun for being what it is, but a read I wanted to be more. There was so much potential for more conflict in the novel, and I kept waiting for it.  I honestly thought the lead up was going to be that Gretchen’s father was either the one who scammed Charlie’s grandfather or was scamming Mrs. Van Alst (the wealthy client and Charlie’s bridge partner).  Nope. I thought maybe we’d get more about her mom, and the single memory she clings to.  Nope.  I thought perhaps Lucretia Thorne, the witch who cursed Everett and the Waybills, might show up.  Nope.  There’s no real conflict beyond the curse and the resolution to that is just absurd.  Convenient, but absurd.

The novel is good for what is, and it does not pretend that it’s going to be something else.  I just wanted to go a little deeper beneath the surfaces Adler was scratching. But it’s mindless & fluffy – a true candy read.  And the cover is cute.

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK – Chris Whitaker

“I’d say follow your heart, but in that way madness lies.”

It’s Stephen King meets Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides with the faintest dash of Fredrik Backman’s Beartown’s small town heart.  It hums with hints of My Girl and Fried Green Tomatoes – perhaps it’s the bees or the friendship  or both.  In short, Chris Whitaker’s All the Colors of the Dark (Crown 2024) is everything I want in a book, and it currently ranks in my top two reads of 2024.

Spanning 1975 – 2001 and traversing all across the country before landing in my very own Carolina where there is purple honey and pirates, All the Colors of the Dark is the story  of Saint, an inquisitive and smart beekeeper turned FBI agent, and Patch, a one eyed boy who envisioned himself a pirate and who took things turned artist turned bank robber, two misfit children whose friendship transcends all odds.  On what Patch dubbed would be “the best day of [his] life,” he finds himself stabbed and bleeding out in the woods after stopping the abduction of Misty Meyers, daughter of one of Monta Clare’s wealthiest families.  He saves Misty, but he is taken instead.  And Saint will leave no stone unturned in her attempts to find her beloved pirate.  The trajectory of their lives is forever entwined and forever plotted the day Patch is taken.

When he is found, he is no longer Saint’s Patch.  He spends his days chasing the ghost of a girl who had been held captive with him, and Saint spends her days trying to find her for him.  They both begin very separate journeys to find all the lost girls.  Other people walk in and out of their lives, some more permanent than others like Misty and Nix and Jimmy.  (Jimmy is my one complaint.  I liked Jimmy.  I liked how he saw Saint when they were children, how he loved her. I’d have made a different decision after prom and likely introduced a new player.  But that complaint isn’t enough to make this less than five stars.)  The world continues to revolve around Patch and Saint; America seems in a constant state of change.  Roe v. Wade has a very important role in the novel, from Misty’s involvement with the rally to the other missing girls, to Saint herself.  That thread is delicately woven into the novel in a shade akin to blood, not a shocking shade, but a shade that blurs and burns.  It’s just so well done.  And that’s but one thread – there are so many brilliant shades that weave in and out of each other in this captivating novel of obsession, loyalty, hope, and a fierce love that stings but tastes like honey. 

Read this book.

PEARL – Siân Hughes

CHOO!  CHOO!  The 2023 Booker Train journey is officially over!  (With a little less than a week to spare!)  Siân Hughes’s Pearl ( W. F. Howes Ltd 2023) is a slim little volume. I decided to read the audiobook as the print copies won’t be available until the end of the month, and I am glad I ended with it.   Pearl is certainly one of my favorites from the longlist.

Marianne’s mother went missing when she was 8.  She just left and never came back, and Marianne struggles with that her entire life.  She is consumed with grief and guilt and anger.  There’s a lovely section where she talks about being asked if there is a history of madness in her family, and she interrupts and says that there is a history of grief, because madness and grief are the same. She is afraid of becoming like her mother, of leaving the daughter that she says she’d been looking for in bad decisions and dead ends, and she makes bargains about how long she’ll need to stick around before becoming like her mother.

But this short novel is her coming to the realization that her mother wasn’t crazy, wasn’t unhappy, wasn’t haunting her.  It takes a lot of growing up to get there – Marianne develops an eating disorder, she cuts herself, she self-sabotages.  When she’s 16, she has an unhealthy relationship with Emily, the daughter of her father’s boss, who wields a secret that could dismantle everything.  She ends up at a solstice barbeque and wonders if perhaps her mother was pagan. She struggles to formulate her memories and make sense of them in relation to what others remember.  She tries to find her mother in children’s stories, nursey rhymes, legends, and  lore. 

Each chapter begins with a nursery rhyme or childhood game.  The title itself derives from a poem of the same name – a poem that Marianne thinks holds the clue to her mother’s disappearance.  And this old English poem becomes extremely important to Marianne as she struggles to find understanding as she grows up.

It’s a novel of a mother’s love and a child’s loss.  It’s a novel of misadventure, forgiveness, and finally letting go.

Read this book.

Booker count 13 of 13.

IN ASCENSION – Martin MacInnes

The Booker train is heading into the station to pick up the 2024 longlist, while will be announced next week, and to be honest, I’m ready to be done with the 2023 list.  I’ve found it overwhelming “meh.”  I still have one more to read, a book which hasn’t been published in the US yet, but I certainly haven’t been wowed.  (Western Lane remains my personal winner.)

I’m going to start this review by saying I’m not sure this 496-page novel knew what it wanted to be, but what it ended up being was certainly not the novel for me.  A lot of folks loved Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension (Black Cat 2023), but I am not one of them.  I don’t dislike it – I just find it entirely too long in some respects while woefully too short in others.

Short and long – Leigh is a talented marine biologist who was part of an exploration team deep in the Atlantic.  This work leads her to the United States and a new space agency that’s really only spoken about in whispers and NDAs. They are interested in her work with algae and its sustainability as a food source for space exploration. She becomes part of that team.

I gravitate toward character development, and there’s not a lot of that here. I also like domesticity and the juxtaposition of that with, as in this case, a sci fi novel. While I get some of that, it’s far from enough. The novel starts with Leigh’s childhood and the physical abuse she sustained at her father’s hands. We also see her trying to be a good daughter with her mother who is experiencing some aspects of dementia – the three weeks she stays with her mom, the plants she sends for her mom to take care of, the recordings, etc. But we also see her lose interest and fail at these human connections.  I wanted to like her.  Maybe as much as she wanted to be there for her family.  I just didn’t.  And she wasn’t.

The novel is divided into five sections.  The first, Endeavor, is the diving expedition.  It is probably my favorite section of the novel as I felt like we did see more of Leigh and her goals, passions, etc.  I never did feel like she was fully fleshed out – she always read a bit hollow, but that got more and more pronounced as the novel progressed.  Intentional?  Maybe.  But it didn’t work for me.

Read it.  Don’t read it.  Meh.

Booker Count 12 of 13.