‘Undercurrents’ (Broken Sleep Books) by Richard Skinner
What a breath of fresh air this slim volume is: a collection of uncompromisingly thought-provoking essays, and the variety of topics so stimulating. It feels like listening to a friend talking about subjects that deeply matter to him but that are also universal, and that he handles as only someone both knowledgeable and passionate about them can.
Richard Skinner is an author of literary fiction, life-writing, essays, non-fiction and poetry, and a highly regarded creative-writing tutor. In Undercurrents, he brings together essays about books, the writing craft, films and music, his own life experiences, as well as interviews with poets. Naturally, the tone varies as a function of each essay’s topic: from the more analytical one for a review, to the reflective and intense one about two beloved friends’ deaths.
Skinner’s thoughts on the link between Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ principle and making connections in one’s writing intrigued me. I enjoyed the expansiveness with which an essay about Talking Heads’ Remain in Light takes in Isiah Berlin, Marcel Proust and the ancient Greek chorus. The description of the state of ‘self-emptying’ and ‘belonging’ to the landscape while on a long hike resonated. The reflections on friendship, death, and acceptance of the unknowable, with regard to the death of dear friends, were relatable and made me think.
This is a rare gem in the current publishing landscape. All credit to the author, and to Broken Sleep Books for its ambitious publishing programme.
Any one-liner for describing what this memoir is about would do it an injustice: it could not encompass its range. It’s about depression, attempted suicide, surviving it, recovering, building a new life… About societal expectations and how they shape us. About our system of mental healthcare. And it’s very much about love.
‘Love Lay Down’ is an important book. Helen Murray Taylor shares with generous openness and formidable eloquence her story of depression’s vortex and of her recovery. Her memoir is vivid, raw, at many points heartbreaking. At the same time, it’s infused with wit, with her ability to perceive the surreal and the outright comedic in some of the worst circumstances. She lets us into her intense emotions and thoughts at the time, as well as into her capacity for looking back at them now with hard-won distance.
Love blazes a luminous, life-saving path throughout this memoir: the love between Helen and her husband; that of family; of friends, colleagues… The whole book strikes me also as a real act of love by its author towards readers: as a gift of hope – and of feeling seen and heard – to sufferers from depression; and as a gift of understanding to all. ‘I hope that no one who reads this has ever found, or will ever find, themselves being dragged under by the force of their depression. But if that is you, […] please, please, call out for help. The help when it comes might not steer you to dry land but it might be the lifejacket that lets you turn on your back and float, the thing that lets you rest awhile, that keeps you afloat a little bit longer. Survival isn’t always about kicking against the waves. Tomorrow the tide might turn and wash you ashore.’
‘It was my father who made the arrangements. My uncle helped, since he lived down south, where all this kind of business is carried out.’
The opening of ‘Love Forms’ sets the tone for the whole novel: a voice that immediately draws you in with its fresh, direct, familiar cadence; and ‘the arrangements’ at the heart of the story. These arrangements see the then sixteen-year-old protagonist, Dawn, whisked off from her home in Trinidad to Venezuela, where she must give birth in secret and surrender her baby for adoption. The reason? ‘She made a mistake and brought shame to her family.’
It’s not long before Dawn realises that the real mistake – whether really hers or her parents’ – was to give up her daughter. The intense longing to find her again impacts the rest of Dawn’s life. Though she goes on to graduate in medicine in the UK, work, marry, and raise two beloved sons, her yearning for the lost child becomes an ever-present, aching part of who she is. When she’s fifty-eight, we witness one of her many attempts to track down her daughter – a search that plays out as a roller coaster of emotions.
Dawn feels so real, that I was absorbed by her evolving feelings and her growing understanding of herself, of her family, and of the changing world around her. This is partly thanks to Claire Adam’s sensitive psychological portrayal of her main character, and partly because of the three-dimensionality she lends to the places – Trinidad, Tobago, Venezuela and London – and times the protagonists inhabit. The dialogue across generations – between Dawn and her parents, siblings, and children – is deeply affecting, as powerful in its silences as in its words. These exchanges and the characters’ actions sustain a taut narrative tension: I often found myself wondering about the consequences of certain conversations – and discovered their outcomes in the novel’s final chapters.
It’s all there in the title: ‘Love Forms’ is about different kinds of love (starting with that of a mother for her child), and about the ways it’s kindled, grows, is challenged, changes… and how it changes us in turn. It’s a poignant, beautifully written novel, and one of the finest I’ve read in a long time. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
‘Poor Uncle Mike,’ I say, slightly surprised at how easy it is to slip into Gramma Ruby’s ways.
So says Lucy, one of several narrators in a collection of stories about the lives of women across three generations of an extended family. We’re in an area of Ontario close to Detroit, ‘a great location […] equidistant from Chrysler’s (the engine plant) and Ford’s Foundry with its medium industrial blue smoke stacks that would one day be shut off for good.’ The protagonists live in cheap post-WW2 housing in need of fixing – ‘tight living, that’s for sure.’
The short stories in Industrial Roots can stand autonomously – indeed, several were published as single pieces – but, taken together, they achieve a coherent whole. Canadian writer Lisa Pike harnesses the potential of this literary form, which is often referred to by different labels (not all synonymous[1]), such as: integrated short-story collection, short-story cycle, inter-related stories, composite novel. Examples include Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid.
The author gives us a choral narration, through which we encounter repeatedly some of the characters at different points in their existence, filtered through various consciousnesses: their own and those of mothers, daughters, grand-daughters, nieces, and cousins, so that they acquire increasing depth and complexity. Their lives are linked by place and patterns of experience, starting with that of unhappy marriages to men who drink, gamble, and are violent towards their wives and children. ‘Some women took to drinking themselves, you know, to cope.’ Intergenerational trauma haunts the living: the first ‘Stella’ in the family was a little girl shot dead in 1920, in a pogrom during the Polish-Soviet War. She and other ancestors live on in the present, with ‘each branch of the family having at least two or three Stellas, Walters and Wandas among them.’
Roots grow deep, spread, and interlace; some surface, and become visible through oral and embodied memory. So, one of the characters drizzles North American dressings onto salads, but also makes pierogi the old-fashioned way her mother and grandmother taught her. She is a repository of the family’s history, one ‘who knew the stories. The one who bothered to hear them and remember them, fix them in her mind the same way the old woman [her grandmother] had them fixed in hers’. Cancer takes away several family members, including one who does not tell her colleagues she’s ill, because ‘They’re going to say: ‘See! And she was such a health nut! Just goes to show you!’ as if getting cancer were her fault, punishment for thinking she was so great, eating healthy and exercising and all.’ Funerals become occasions to grieve, make peace with, reflect on, and – in one case – even meet, relations for the first time.
Some in the younger generation seek to escape the pull of their industrial roots through education, but they grow disillusioned. One of them, debt-laden, recalls Chomsky’s ‘call for change, resistance’ during her university days and concludes she’s living ‘the pragmatics of his prophecy,’ ‘the wearing down of the intellectual, of those people who saw the bigger picture of things, […] how PhDs were now living on food stamps.’ Another earns more by writing essays for students than from her precarious post as a lecturer. She sees the higher-education system operating like an industry and treating her like a mere productive resource. Her outbursts against it, ‘ad-libbing about things like the psychology of advertising, the dismantling of the welfare state […]’], fall on students’ uncomprehending ears.
The book raises questions about numerous aspects of family connectedness. How does family impact us? How do we show care? Do we ever know those near us as well as we believe? Another major theme is mortality – and therefore the sense of a life’s meaning and purpose. ‘A death every few years. Coming to a certain point in life when you realise a funeral could arrive at any moment and it’s just better to have a designated outfit, there, hanging at the back of the closet, ready to go. […] You may as well pick out the outfit you want to be buried in, along with a photo […] A sense of hope for the family, the picture letting them believe that life had been good and happy and worthwhile.’ The quote which precedes the book seems doubly significant: it’s from Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’, which also handled these themes, while his ‘Go Down, Moses’ broke new ground in this literary form.
Lisa Pike’s characters and sense of place linger in the mind. Separate voices distinguish the protagonists, through their narration and dialogues across different tones and registers. Their environments and possessions are used to delineate them, their relationships, and circumstances with gripping specificity. So, a woman’s perception of her grandmother’s wish to leave a chipped platter to another granddaughter is quietly heart-breaking: ‘Wanda (daughter), of all people, did not deserve the worn, discoloured, beautiful, rose-patterned platter with the two deep chips on the right-hand side.’
Lisa Pike’s love of, and playfulness with, language enables her to pull off this ambitious work. She was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Grant and received support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to complete the book. All credit to Heloïse Press for bringing this Canadian author and Industrial Roots to readers’ attention.
Industrial Roots is published on 11 April 2023.
[1] Dunn, M., Morris, A. (1995). The Composite Novel – The Short Story Cycle in Transition. New York : Twayne, Macmillan Publishing
So, what to consider when reviewing a work of fiction? Here are my top ten tips.
Begin with a gripping line or paragraph which conveys your overall opinion. It could be phrased as (a) a statement or (b) a question. As an alternative, you could begin with (c) a quote from the book which encapsulates its themes. An example of each:
The title says it all: smoking kills – though in the case of this novel, the victim is not the smoker but those he kills (‘and not through passive smoking,’ he clarifies) in order to enjoy the pleasures of a cigarette. We’re firmly in humour noir territory: the book’s incisive, satirical take on modern-day life offers a succession of laugh-out-loud moments.[1]
What might drive a left-wing intellectual to espouse xenophobic views and defend the indefensible? How might the community around him react? How would you react if he were your father? In Autopsy of a Father, Pascale Kramer poses uncomfortable questions and tests your tolerance of disquiet.[2]
‘“Fate,” said Arthur. “The capital letter F. But chance is a powerful force, and suddenly you acquire a Fate that was never assigned to you. Some kind of accidental fate. It happens in a flash.”’[3]
Give us a reason why we should read the book / why it should spark our curiosity
E.g.: One of the most original novels I’ve read in a long time, The Core of the Sun is set in an alternative present – in the “Eusistocratic Republic of Finland”.[4]
In your plot summary, tell us about the protagonist(s)’ approach to the key issue/conflict/mystery
E.g.: Caterina’s process of reconstruction involves acquiring that part of herself which she left to her twin. […] But as she learns to take care of their elderly mother, of Olivia’s son and of a young neighbour who has lost her little girl, she understands that it was too simple for her and others to rely on Olivia.[5]
What questions does the story raise?
Does it interrogate and challenge any stereotypes? Or the opposite?
Does it prompt us to read relevant books?
An example of questions raised: Raimo leaves readers to judge: was there any love at all on his part, or only desire, fetishism, possession and the drive to dominate, self-justified with theword ‘love’? Can any of these ever coexist with love, or do they often taint it, but only to hardly perceptible and therefore unrecognised degrees?[6]
Tell us how the book makes you feel
What, if anything, will move us? Or amuse us, etc?
What causes that response? It could be an episode, or the language, or…
E.g.: It would be incorrect to infer too much neatness from the symmetries in the book’s structure. The subtle play of balance and counterbalance constantly engages the reader, while offering a reassuring framework to explore the chaos of complex issues with no easy answers.[7]
What might this book add to readers’ lives?
E.g.: ‘A Whole Life’ attests to the enduring value of just this kind of ‘lightness’ – a lightness of touch which offsets the depth of Robert Seethaler’s themes, distilling them into thoughts and images that linger in the reader’smind.[8]
Select your quotes carefully
The ones you choose should illustrate your points
Try to find one or two that are representative of the book as a whole
E.g.: He possesses the ability to capture the joy of the earth warmed by the sun under his “night-damp feet”, the wood which “had stored the warmth of the last days of summer and smelled of dry moss and resin”, and the coolness of a flat rock on which he lies down.[9]
Analyse the author’s (and the translator’s, if it’s a foreign work in English) treatment of the most relevant elements of writing, such as:
individuality of voice (style, language…)
characterisation
sense of place
structure
E.g.:
The writing alternates wit and humour with darkness and melancholy, dramatic tension with aphorisms, the real with the surreal, poignant observation with optimism. The rhythm of the prose is thus pleasantly engaging, and the plot suspenseful – not least due to some ethically questionable choices on the protagonist’s part – but more compelling still is the development of the themes over the story’s arc. Antoine Laurain succeeds in creating a first-person narrator who is whimsically and yet realistically unaware of the full depth of his unhappiness until he has distanced himself from it.[10]
Authors of intimate stories that reflect the course of a country’s historical fortunes face a challenge: to create fictional protagonists we’ll care about without their writerly imagination being clipped by the magnitude and details of nationally significant events. Aareleid deftly overcomes that challenge, giving us believable human beings through the eyes of…[11]
You can mention relevant novels or short stories by other writers
E.g.: The themes may bring to mind Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but it would be a disservice to both authors to insist on comparisons.[12]
Ensure your review’s ending addresses your central idea
E.g.: This is a book which challenges you to work hard and amply rewards you for it: a gripping read in its own right, and fiction that enhances our engagement with the world we inhabit.[13]
The July 2019 edition of the European Literature Network‘s #Riveting Reviews is out today. My review is of Veronica Raimo’s “The Girl at the Door” (4th Estate). Bold stylistic choices give a sharp edge to this novel. This is unsettling, thought-provoking work.
The Girl at the Door is in tune with the concerns of the #MeToo movement, but Raimo began writing the novel years before its rise. The book is relevant also to other burning issues. It highlights the question of the failure to see clearly and to seek dialogue not only at a personal level but at a societal one, especially in the age of social media, when views of history and the present seem to polarise around extremes.
This is a book which challenges you to work hard and which amply rewards you for it: a gripping read in its own right, and fiction that enhances our engagement with the world. Highly recommended.
Recently the European Literature Network published The Swiss Riveter, a compendium of writing about contemporary fiction, poetry and memoir from Switzerland. It contains essays on Swiss literature’s richness and diversity, as well as reviews and extracts, including an exclusive English excerpt of Peter Stamm’s The Gentle Indifference of the World (to be published this year in Michael Hoffman’s translation) and an essay by Swiss-British writer Alain de Botton.
My review of Pascale Kramer’s Autopsy of a Father (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017) appears on pp. 56-57. Kramer won the Grand Prix Suisse de Littérature in 2017 for her oeuvre. Autopsy of a Father is a powerful novel for our times: it tackles xenophobia, racism and nationalism. You can access the review here.
The European Literature Network promotes literature in translation. The Swiss Riveter was produced with support from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK, Arts Council England and ELit Literature House Europe. Sections of it are now available also in digital form here.
This is the fifth of the European Literature Network’s Riveters. The first was devoted to literature from Poland, on the occasion of the 2017 London Book Fair’s Polish focus. The second, on literature from Russia, coincided with ELNet’s Russian events at the British Library. In The Nordic Riveter of October 2017, five countries were represented: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. The fourth covered the Baltics, the focus of the 2018 London Book Fair.
The Polish Riveter
The Russian Riveter
The Nordic Riveter
The Baltics Riveter
Image credits:
Images courtesy of The European Literature Network.
A review of That Summer in Puglia has just been published in the Winter 2018 edition of Ambassador Magazine, NIAF’s beautiful semi-annual publication. Washington-based NIAF – the National Italian American Foundation – is a key resource for the Italian American Community. It aims to preserve and promote the cultural heritage of Italian Americans, and to strengthen ties between the United States and Italy.
My thanks to NIAF and to Ambassador Magazine reviewer Kirsten Keppel for her fabulous piece on That Summer in Puglia.
Credits:
Article reproduced with kind permission of NIAF / Ambassador Magazine.
Valeria Vescina 