Karen Joy Fowler and Jonathan Lethem

     I have neglected to mention two quite extraordinary books that I read recently--extraordinary in quite different ways. 
     Karen Joy Fowler's novel is entitled "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," and the Lethem book is "Motherless Brooklyn."
     For convenience, let's call the Fowler book WAACBO. The narrator, Rosemary, had a brother and a twin sister, Fern, but both vanished from her life--her sister when she was quite young, and her brother later in her childhood. All the reviews felt compelled to divulge a fact that only appears when one is well into the book--that the twin sister was a chimpanzee, brought into her family by her father, an academic psychologist at Indiana University, who is investigating the chimp's social development in relation to his own children. And then a point came when the chimpanzee had to go--and Fern disappeared from Rosemary's life.

     The novel’s narrator, Rosemary, is an ideal informant: witty, 

skeptical, and damaged by the loss of her twin. Her storytelling is very engaging. She occasionally switches to a wisecracking use of the second person to draw in the reader. She has lived an observed life from the start, in a long household experiment with the chimpanzee as a twin sister. Where other children had preschool and baby sitters, Rosemary had lab exercises and grad students, and the omnipresent, amber-eyed, diaper-wearing Fern, a hairy, wiry whirlwind of a sister who funnels her lips and scales furniture in a trice.

     We meet Rosemary in later life, looking back over these childhood events.  WAAACBO is a fascinating book, very well written, and the author has drawn on numerous accounts of experiments in which baby chimps have been brought up alongside human children.
     Lethem is, of course, a very accomplished writer, and in "Motherless Brooklyn" he takes on a task--at which he succeeds brilliantly--of having a first-person narrator who suffers from Tourettes Syndrome: Lionel Essrog has all sort tics beside the standard one of suddenly shouting out inappropriate phrases, or obscenities, or mashing up one set of words into another that sounds similar: Grand Central Station might become Sand General Tension. He obsessively touches things, and numbers play a big role in his thinking. He and a couple of other boys--orphans from an orphanage--are recruited into a hapless detective agency, or is it a car service?, run by one Frank Minna, and the novel opens with Lionel and another of Minna's 'boys' trailing Minna on some mysterious assignment that leads to his death.  The novel then follows Lionel as he solves the mystery of Minna's death--a quest that involves the convoluted past history of Minna's life, and that of his wife, his brother's embrace of Buddhism, Japanese businessmen buying sea-food in Maine...and much else.
     But you have to keep reading, and you have to admire how Lethem sustains the Tourettish (can one say that?) narration.
Some readers might get a bit tired of the Tourettes schtick, or the seemingly endless twists and turns of the story line: but I certainly enjoyed the book and stuck with it until the end.

David Constantine

     I had never heard of David Constantine, and this must be because he has not been much published in the United States--or perhaps he was published and I just missed him. But after reading a glowing review of his book of stories, "Another Country," I bought it for my Kindle. And I am enormously impressed. The US publisher obviously felt he had to push the promotion of the book, and these extraordinary blurbs appear in the material at the front of the e-book and presumably on the cover of the print version.

 “After reading David Constantine’s story ‘In Another Country’ … I can’t figure out why a US press hasn’t caught on to his work. He’s won … the Frank O’Connor Award … beating out Joyce Carol Oates, Deborah Levy, and Peter Stamm—and no wonder.”—Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review
  
 “Constantine is writing for his life. Every sentence and paragraph is shaped, tense with meaning and unobtrusively beautiful, his images of the natural world burning their way into the reader’s mind.”—Maggie Gee, The Sunday Times   
    
“Masterful … pregnant with fluctuating interpretations and concealed motives.”—The Guardian           

“This is a superb collection of stories: Constantine’s writing is rare today, unafraid to be rich and allusive and unashamedly moving.”—The Independent  

 “The excellence of the collection is fractal: the whole book is excellent, and every story is excellent, and every paragraph is excellent, and every sentence is excellent. And unlike some literary fiction, it’s effortless to read.” —The Independent on Sunday   

“This is a haunting collection filled with delicate clarity. Constantine has a sure grasp of the fear and fragility within his characters.” —A.L. Kennedy 

    There is a strangeness about the stories and much of the writing deals with what is going on in the heads of the characters. There are also certain themes that get repeated. Characters living under a railway viaduct appear in two stories. Characters climbing or hiking to remote places and spending the night there also feature in two stories, and two stories concern people living on remote islands. But this does not in the least detract from the quality of the writing and the acute insight as to what is happening in the characters' heads.
     The length of the stories varies, and couple might almost have been slightly short novellas. But this is a good solid book, with seventeen stories, all of high quality. Constantine's talents are considerable--he has published a number of collections of his own poetry and also translations of German and French poets; he is co-editor of the journal "Modern Poetry In Translation; and for the full range of his work you will need to go to Wikepedia...
     The title story "Another Country" has provided the basis for a new film entitled "45 Years," with Tom Courtenay and Charlotte rampling.
     







  

Emma Healey and Chuck Palahniuk

     Delaying writing something about books I have read has the disadvantage that one forgets some of the details. This reminds me of my experience in going into the Library of Congress and searching for the list of books I have narrated--and there are over a hundred of them. You would think that having read a book aloud, one would remember it; but as I scan the list of titles, many of them mean absolutely nothing to me--I have no idea of what they were about.
     I strongly recommend Emma Healey's novel "Elizabeth is Missing." It was a page-turner, but off-hand I cannot remember the name of the narrator--who is suffering from dementia and her days in the here and now are totally confused, but she has almost 
photographic memory for events of fifty or so years ago. To remind myself a bit of the characters I turned to a Guardian review, which begins--

"This debut novel comes garlanded with the heavy weight of both expectation and recommendation. Deborah Moggach: "I read it at a gulp." Emma Donoghue: "Elizabeth Is Missing will stir and shake you." Jonathan Coe: "One of those semi-mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down." It was the subject of a bidding war between nine publishers, the TV rights have already been sold and you can almost hear the calls being placed to Dame Judi and/or Dame Maggie."

     The narrator is Maud, and in the present day she is obsessed with what has happened to her friend Elizabeth, who seems to have vanished. But she also casts her mind back into the postwar period, when her sister, Sukie disappeared, shortly after marrying a shifty character called Frank. Maud's recollections of that time are detailed and crystal-clear. When Sukie disappears, her new husband, Frank, falls briefly under suspicion. And Maud's family's lodger, Douglas, seems to know more than he's telling. And perhaps the strange madwoman who lives rough on Sukey's street also knows something? And the past mystery is solved in the present day.

    I am not sure what to make of Chuck Palahniuk's novel "Doomed." I had read occasionally about this writer's talents but never tried a book of his. "Doomed" is, to say the least, an enormously original conception, and very, very funny, although the 'plot' or story-line got me very confused towards the end. The chapters are mostly blog-posts by Madison Spencer, the daughter of two film-star celebrities (think Brad Pitt and his spouse whose name eludes me) who has died at the age of thirteen. Her blog posts are made under her e-mail address---madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell. Her mother seems to have been guided in life by one leonard brainiac (yes, lower case) who contributes the odd chapter as hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell. There are many references back to Plato and the mysterious "thing child" is often mentioned, as is the North Pacific Gyre, where supposedly all the plastic trash in the oceans is gradually collected and creating an island--or is it? As you can see from my account--I got a bit lost in all this--but Palahniuk is clearly a unique talent, and this book is worth a try to see if you are hooked. I tried another one by him and gave up after the first chapter.

     I have also recently read a book about art forgery called "The Forger's Spell" by Edward Dolnick. It focuses on the Dutch forger Van Meegeren and his forgery of Vermeers; but it also discusses the wider questions of why and how forgers succeed, and why is a successful forgery worth millions when it seems to have been properly authenticated and worth nothing when exposed as a forgery. After all it looks the same. I liked the vignette about a British forger who started by selling paintings marked on the back "Genuine Forgery," but then he was led astray by a friend who had been offered $100,000 by a prominent auction house for a painting that their experts were sure was genuine. The book also has quite a lot about Holland during the German occupation in WW2.