Search Results

I’ve recommended a number of different books in this newsletter so far and they’ve had one thing in common, they were fiction. Safe, Wanted and Loved is not. It is a memoir written by a man whose wife suffered a sudden and severe episode of psychosis. Names and locations have been changed, Patrick Dylan is not the author’s real name, his wife’s name is not Mia, the family didn’t live where the book says they did and I guess many of the other characters are going under invented names too. But the scenes are real, devastatingly real, and the emotion and tension is stretched tight throughout. If you’ve seen the person-stealing effect of mental illness close up you will recognize it here. If you haven’t, this book will be an eyeopener. Patrick tells his story in a voice that is immediate and sincere. Raw fear, confusion, compassion and determination jostle with each other. They are feelings you can share in. Mia, under stress at work, became unable to sleep and convinced she was being videoed and would go to prison for a trivial mistake she might have made. She told Pat this after waking him at three in the morning. The next day she terrified her sister, telling her they had to contact the author of the children’s books because he had the ‘answer’. And so it began. ‘“Pat, we need to kill the dog,” Mia said in a calm voice. She was standing by the foot of our bed, our old miniature dachshund cradled in her arms…It’s the devil… He got inside her.” I started to look down, but she cut me off. “Don’t look into her eyes!” she shouted.’ There are wonderful doctors in this story, supportive school counsellors and threatening ones, brutally realistic police officers and intransigent health insurance companies. I’ve met them all during my years living in California. Patrick’s story has the supreme merit of being accurate. He soon knows his way around the entire pharmacopeia of mind-blasting drugs the medical profession has at its disposal and soon realizes how primitive the whole science is. He sees the effect on his children and how they need help to cope. He learns that the only way to deal with the industrial medical complex is to be as heartless as it is, ‘‘’ And now I owe you $30,000. But I can’t possibly pay that…I know how this works. If my insurance were paying this they’d have negotiated reduced rates…I am going to write you a check for ten grand.”’ And Patrick finds out just who will stand by him, an outrageously otherworldly brother-in-law, and who will make his life even more difficult, a school counsellor who has to be talked out of calling child protective services. Patrick’s declared motive in publishing his story is to bring mental illness out into the open and help people get over the shame and the feeling that they need to hide their sickness. Yet the book has enough instances of the kind of treatment families in this predicament can receive for it to be perfectly understandable why they would not invite it. Patrick interweaves the story of Mia’s illness with a mini-biography of their lives together. Personally, I found these sections less compelling and I didn’t take up the invitation to listen to the songs referenced at the start of each chapter. Other reviewers, however, found the love story heartwarming and the music-listening rewarding. They do both add structure and relief to a roller-coaster-ride of a tale; a tale which has the added advantage of being written like a detective story. Will Patrick and Mia ever find out who the culprit is, the name of the disease, and will they ever overcome it? This is not a depressing read. It’s emotionally challenging but also uplifting, and not in a soppy way. In the end the medication that helps Mia is alarmingly simple. No spoiler apologies here. You might not give this book a go if you thought it was going to be a tragedy. Although for many people with a mental illness the outcome is tragedy, or long, drawn-out misery and persecution, and that is something we should remember.

In 2012 a friend persuaded me to apply for the Tin House writers’ conference, because Paul Harding was leading a class on novel writing. She had read Tinkers and she wanted to find out how he did it. I don’t know if I did find that out but I discovered a lot about writing, drank some great beer, and made lasting memories. Tinkers confounds all the advice my editor is currently giving me: ‘too much description, digression and diversion’. Tinkers is all description, digression and diversion. It hardly seems reasonable to call it a novel at all. It’s a collection of vignettes; the pieces of a stained-glass window that assemble themselves into a view on a story. George Crosby lies dying and thinks about his father; possibly that’s what’s happening. This book doesn’t bother itself with mundane attempts at rationalizing its existence. You have to take this book on its own terms. George’s father’s story is told. Howard Crosby, was a tinker, moving through parts of New England with a mule-drawn wagon. He was also an epileptic, in the days when the illness could have you confined in an asylum. George, for his part, tinkers with clocks. Or did, before he was dying. Perhaps ‘evocation’ rather than ‘novel’ would be a better description for this book. Harding places you closer than you could have dreamed possible to human thoughts, the natural world, and the insides of clocks. There is immense variety in his writing style. There might not be the pace you get from a fast-progressing plot or rapid dialogue but there’s plenty in the gallop from a dying man hallucinating his house collapsing, to the stubbornness of country women, to an eighteenth-century clock-repair manual. This is not a book you can read while letting your mind wander elsewhere. Every word has been carefully chosen; every scene is a story in its own right. Some images are surreal and disturbing, such as the description of what happens in George’s body as he dies. Some are poignant: ‘God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoe shine, and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes.’ Some are mystical: ‘When new buds light up wet black branches, they seem to burst forth from another side of time, which belonged to men like my father.’ Some are brutally matter of fact: ‘He was dying from renal failure. His actual death was going to be from poisoning by uric acid. Whatever food or water he managed to consume never came back out of his body.’ Perhaps it’s as well such an intense book is only 190 pages long, in a format smaller than your average paperback. If you like writing that shines out like the crown jewels, Tinkers is for you.

‘ “Where are you from?” Elif Shafak asked herself in a 2020 Vanity Fair article. “I am from multiple places. I come from memories and forgettings, from stories and silences, from various countries and cultures, but also their ruins.” ’ [i] Shafak is usually described as a Turkish/British writer, obscuring her birth in France and large parts of her childhood spent in Spain and the United States. What is not obscure is that for one of the main characters in The Bastard of Istanbul, Asya Kazanci, Istanbul is the place where she grows through the intensity of adolescence and along with that intensity absorbs her home-town into her being. I say one of the main characters because at the heart of this book are two main characters, Asya and Armanoush, one Turkish, the other Armenian. There are also a wealth of other people, Turkish aunts, Turkish intellectuals, Armenian aunts and uncles, Armenian ancestors and American parents, not to mention a cyber-world. One of the ways Shafak keeps you grounded is through food. ‘ “ But honey you are just nibbling like a bird. Don’t tell me you are not even going to taste my manti ?” Auntie Varsenig wailed with a scoop in her hand and such severe dismay in her dark brown eyes that it made Armanoush wonder if something far more life-and-death than a bowl of manti was concerned .’ Shafak also uses food to bind the story together. Each chapter is named for a food. Turkish and Armenian food is the same food, it even has the same names. This when the American-Armenian Armanoush first meets her step-father’s family in Istanbul: ‘ “ These are all my favorite foods. I see you have made hummus, baba ganoush, yalanci sarma… and look at this, you have baked churek !” “Aaaah, do you speak Turkish!” Auntie Banu exclaimed, flabbergasted as she walked back in with a steaming pot in her hands.’ “ No, no, I do not speak the Turkish language, unfortunately, but I guess I speak the Turkish cuisine.” The mystery of Asya’s birth is the spine of the plot. She is the ‘bastard’ of the title. The story of Armanoush’s family is its ribs. The four Turkish aunts react with disbelief and horror to Armanoush’s version of their history, but, interestingly, the reaction is to history, not to her. Only Aunt Banu, the soothsayer who has captured two djinns, one perched on each shoulder, has a direct and terrible insight into the truth. In 2006 Elif Shafak faced prosecution in Turkey for ‘insulting Turkishness’, because The Bastard of Istanbul talked about the Armenian genocide. The charges were dropped, but she moved to London, UK. In 2019 she was once again under investigation in Turkey for the representation of sexual violence and child abuse in later novels. If you like an intense relationship to place, a host of engaging characters, a flirtation with magic, a window into history and culture, or even precocious adolescents, The Bastard of Istanbul is for you. Manti : meat filled dumplings with a yoghurt and garlic sauce Yalanci Sarma : vine leaves stuffed with a vegetable and rice filling Churek : a flat-bread with sesame seeds [i] Elif Shafak, Perpetual Motion , Vanity Fair 2020

The setting is Oxford and the year 1976. A magnet for me. I was living in Oxford during the long, hot summer of 1976. Recently I came across a blurb for a historical novel that described that time as wonderful. It wasn’t. It was disconcerting and oppressive; difficult to believe months without rain were following one on another, in England. This is the atmosphere of Restless . Ruth’s mother, Sally Gilmartin, is handsome, eccentric and emotionally detached, and she lives in the most remote Oxfordshire village imaginable. She cuts her lawn with shears and surveys the woodland at the end of her garden with binoculars. Ruth is not a run-of-the-mill individual herself. Academically brilliant she is resentfully not completing her thesis and spends her days teaching English to foreign students (badly by modern standards) and caring for her five-year-old son, who is the equal in brilliance and eccentricity to both his mother and his grandmother. Then, on a regular Saturday visit, Ruth finds her mother in a wheelchair, although there appears to be nothing wrong with her. ‘ “I know what you’re thinking, Ruth,” she said. “But you’re wrong, quite wrong.’ She stood up out of her chair, tall and rigid. “Wait a second,” she said, and went upstairs. “Have you made Granny cross again?” Jochen said, in a low voice, accusingly. “No.” My mother came down the stairs – effortlessly it seemed to me – carrying a thick buff folder under her arm. She held it out for me. “I’d like you to read this.” ’ And so begins the story of Eva Delectorskaya. It’s a tale of spies and betrayals; of real dangers and presumed ones; of naivety and love coupled with a frightening level of courage and skill. It’s a story about British actions in World War II that you may never have imagined, but you won’t be too surprised when you find out what they were. As Ruth bumbles over a potential love affair, drinks and smokes too much and regrets her entanglement with Jochen’s father she gets drawn further and further into Eva’s story, even to the extent of seeking the aid of her thesis supervisor. If you like strong, intelligent, and haunted, female characters, slowly unfolding mysteries and spy-thriller type dramatics, Restless is for you. There is also a BBC series available on Prime Video.

I almost hesitate to recommend Birds Without Wings, it’s so long and stuffed full of so much history. But then I could say it’s intoxicating, it’s high comedy, it’s romance, it’s sweeping, ornate, intense, fervent, brutal and, my not-so-favorite fashionable word, empathetic. Birds Without Wings is the last of the five books I pulled off my shelf because the covers are beautiful, the five books that inspired this newsletter. It also follows on neatly from last month’s book, because it is set in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. The imaginary village of Eskibahçe is in western Turkey, near Smyrna on the Aegean Sea. Village in this sentence means both the buildings and the inhabitants. Eskibahçe is remote. It is visited only by traders and tramps. If its people travel, they go in caravan, because the roads are dangerous. It clings to tradition and to a habit of rubbing along. At first this appears to be a fairy-tale Convivencia, where everyone speaks Turkish but writes it in Greek letters, where there are characters called Iskander the Potter, Stamos the Birdman and Mohammed the Leech Gatherer, but any Utopianism is quickly punctured. Only Greek, Christian boys are taught to read and write, a woman’s life is in the hands of a man, poverty is so extreme that one family lives in the hollow trunk of a tree. De Bernieres shirks nothing, but at the same time writes with tenderness and humor. Nobody, not even those guilty of the most intolerant thoughts or of the most heinous acts, is treated as evil. And nobody, not even the village imam, the most convincing representation of a saint I have ever seen in a work of fiction, is a perfect shining hero. You can’t identify with the protagonist in this book, because there isn’t one, and yet there are many. Birds Without Wings could be described as interconnected short stories. It could also be described as an epic of Tolstoyan magnitude. The story of Eskibahçe is interrupted by sections relating the career of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). As the book goes on, these sections get longer and the Eskibahçe sections shrink. A cloud falls and you long for the characters you’ve grown to love. You might even give up, because history, man’s inhumanity to man, becomes so depressing. Don’t give up. Like reading War and Peace, skip the bits you find to be too much historical detail, or too much commentary. The rest is worth it. From chapter 77, I am Philothei (12) When he was a boy, Ibrahim the goatherd: ‘… could imitate all the different bleats of a goat. I have forgotten the names of some of these bleats, but they were things like the bleat of a goat who is looking for its kid, the bleat of a goat that has accidentally bitten on a stone, and the bleat of a goat that is unable to fart… as time went by he used to do bleats that were more and more absurd. The bleat of a goat that is thinking of becoming a Christian. The bleat of a goat that is too stupid to know how stupid it is. The bleat of a goat that had a good idea the day before and can’t remember what it was. The best bleat of all was the bleat of a goat with nothing to say.’ If you like a long, slow read that will make you laugh out loud, while also making you cry and squirm in horror, Birds Without Wings is for you. Louise de Bernières is the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (misleadingly and unaccountably published as Corelli’s Mandolin in the US). The lovely cover is from my American edition. The print in this edition is very small, so you might prefer an e-book. With a Kindle you can also get instant translations of all the foreign words de Bernières sprinkles around and links to Wikipedia explanations of all the Turkish objects, customs and foods.