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 ... **
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