The Forrests, Emily Perkins

So I finished The Forrests a while ago and got busy, so this blog is half-baked but at least it's up. For anyone who has not already read any Emily Perkins, she is a New Zealand writer whose short story collections and novels have been continually excellent, original works. I was introduced to her writing by my kiwi friend Peter Johns in Melbourne. The Forrests has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize Long List 2012, and I'm trying to locate the short list, if any ... and did you know that an actor from TV series Downton Abbey is a JUDGE?! Goodness! I try to always read the ultimate winner, hence my comment on Barnes' Sense of an Ending in a previous blog.

The Forrests are a family - with slightly dysfunctional aspects like any family. They also have an interloper, Daniel, whose story is slightly annoying because it is so veiled. We never really find out why he is so embedded in their family and how his life pans out, which is frustrating, but he appears in Dorothy's life at crucial moments - and in her sister's life. I suppose this is fair - the focus after all is on Dorothy herself, and her closeness with her sister Evelyn is part of her identity. I worried about Dorothy. She was not always in charge of her own life. I found her life unutterably sad at times, really, although reviewers are saying she is bursting with life - and she does - I found her somehow trapped and tied down by her sense of fixedness and a sort of lumpeness. BUT Perkins has this amazing ability to capture how we/I feel or see - so many times in this book I recognised the moment, the way children speak, the way it feels to pick up a child from school, the expressions of awkwardness in personal life, the being mid-40s, the ongoing struggle - ah, Perkins is perceptive! It's funny too, lots of it, and I enjoyed it while also noting the frustrations I felt.

Towards the end of this book, Dorothy, whose whole life we sweep through in the course of reading, resorts to reading books with her magnifying glass, even in public. 'How did women go about the world on their own without books?' she wonders: 'You saw it, but she would never understand.' Dorothy is a curious person for me. This book moves through time in a most interesting way - we are allowed to see the whole of Dorothy's life more or less but in bursts, so in childhood, in young adulthood, married life and middle age and so on until she is, in the final, amazing chapter, in and out of consciousness and time as she fades away. (That final chapter is actually one of the most challenging pieces of writing I've read of Perkins or anyone for a while. Terrific, moving, intelligible only by reading the book from start to finish, intoxicating.)

I think it's the movement of time in the story which both propels it and makes it work so well, and which also destabilises any clear reading and makes it deflect aspects of detangling - in other words it's just obscure enough without being ridiculous - a bit like Perkins' Novel about my Wife. I suppose I was also surprised by The Slap in the way that Tsolkias takes readers forward in the narrative with separate narrators but also in time so there's no exact or real retracing of steps - a really cool approach.

Get yourselves a copy and read - now, I've found out there's a new Drusilla Modjeska book called The Mountain - a fitting companion title to this one, I wonder???

**Oh and on tigers in literature - I should've noted that the tiger motif is a powerful one in imperial literature (The Tiger's Wife) and that also makes the Obreht book highly interesting ... **

The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht

Too long between blogs, friends! Life became consuming - I've also nearly finished The Forrests, and am now digesting it ... today I'll recommence with a relatively short blog about a wonderful book I also read fairly recently. Winner of the Orange prize for Fiction in 2011, Tea Obreht's book kept asking me to read it, with its effective cover, like a lino or woodcut print, of a woman embracing a tiger. That the author is young and this is her debut novel is of course sobering since the book is utterly magical and beautifully written. I can't imagine many young writers being able to produce this work. Set in the Balkans following conflict - during wartime and after it, and also moving between periods of time using very interesting narrative modes - The Tiger's Wife unravels myths and legends about a tiger who lives with a woman on the edges of town, becoming her lover. Her own history is a dark and secret tale, but only one of many in the book. The main narrator is a doctor, Natalia, tending to communities of ill and wounded, and to children, during wartime. She remembers stories about her recently deceased grandfather - he dies during the story - and his tales of meeting a curious 'deathless' man who reappeared at intervals during his life, edging him, possibly, closer to knowing his own end. Obreht has such control over these multiple stories, layers of myths, legends, characters peopling the stories, and also over language itself that I was totally in awe of her skill.

I fell in love with this book, kept eking it out so I did not have to say goodbye to it. Revisiting it now for the blog makes me find it again. I suppose I found resonance in it about history - my own craft and subject - and about twentieth century war and conflict, the disputes across ethnic and religious lines and social divisions which are more than repugnant - they are simply horrendous. Natalia must deal with this too. To soften the political edges of this story, Obreht uses magic realism. We are never quite sure where we are in time or place - so much so that one bookstore person I was chatting to said this was one drawback of the book for her. But for me, this was a useful device. We can see Bosnia-Herzegovina, this recent tragic conflict in our own times, and link it to Europe's dark history, the 'dark continent', to borrow from historian Mark Mazower http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/67. You can see from Obreht's biography her own personal history woven into this work, too. See: http://www.teaobreht.com/biography.html This is, then, a powerful, engaging and fully-charged story with much beauty and many significant interludes within it. I was journeying through this book in ways which made the political and drier historical work about our own times come to life, breathing.

Read! Read! Read!