What i read: May

“Slow Days, Fast Company”, by Eve Babitz

A sundrenched fictionalised memoir about Babitz’s life partying in and around 1970s Los Angeles.

Through ten stories, interspersed with italicised notes ostensibly written to plead the attention of an unrequited love, Babitz explores the highs and lows of life.

These stories are love letters to Los Angeles, the burning concrete footpaths and intersecting cultures and the never-ending churn of dreamers flooding the hotels in search of their big moment. Babitz is bright and open and writes with razor sharp clarity about her life and the power she knowingly wields with her beauty.

She is ravenous for new experiences, gorging on drugs and alcohol and food and sexual encounters, as comfortable brushing the shoulders of Hollywood celebrities as she is taking a trip to meet a pen-pal fan and learn about his father’s vineyard.

It is a time-capsule in good and bad ways – as well as capturing the vibe and creative spirit of 1970s California there are also multiple moments of bald, casual racism which I found quite jarring given how accepting she is of so many other aspects of the human experience.

Full of beautiful, tightly constructed sentences, and intelligently observed moments, this was a delight to read, especially as a palate cleanser between longer novels.

“Hamnet”, by Maggie O’Farrell

A moving historical novel about fate, family, and grief.

One beautiful 1596 summer’s morning, tragedy befalls a family in Stratford-upon-Avon. The tell-tale signs of plague have taken hold of a young girl and her twin brother, Hamnet, searches in a panic to find someone to help. His grandfather is dismissive, his grandmother and sisters are out shopping, his father is working in London, and his mother is miles away tending to bees. By the time the mother – Agnes, a beautiful and wise healer – gets home, the fever has settled in. But which twin will death take?

This novel examines this family over two timelines –when Agnes meets her younger husband and joins the family in their household and adjoining glove-making workshop, and later when they are long married and struggling to deal with long distance and the grief of losing their child. It is made clear very early in the novel that it is Hamnet, the son, who will not survive the sickness. Fate and the fight to change one’s predetermined path in the life is a running theme. The reader knows, though the characters obviously do not, that the father is William Shakespeare and will soon become one of the most famous people in history. This focuses almost entirely on his invisible homelife – only entering a playhouse in the final pages – on the dignity, urgency, and lasting impact that a quiet life can entail.

Agnes is an interesting character (although I think this now suffers from the Seinfeld effect of having the ‘slightly out of time herbalist healer woman’ trope being a bit too overused now), and William is an understandably distant shite (it’s really not about him at all). But the child characters are brilliant – eloquent, distinctive, believable as kids but also interesting to follow developing into adults.

This was an interesting and well-crafted meditation on grief, and the different ways it can present in people, how it can draw some people closer and push some apart. It is very introspective, I genuinely have no idea how they are adapting it for a movie (I suspect they will invent a lot of scenes for ol’ Will in London, undermining the strength of the novel but we shall see…)

“Tar Baby”, by Toni Morrison

A powerful novel about race, class, and gender in late 20th-century America, centred around a tumultuous love affair.

On the fictional Caribbean ‘Isle des Chevaliers’, in an extravagant mansion, live the Streets, a white family that made their fortune through a candy company. The patriarch, Valerian, is now retired and irritated with his wife Margaret who is anxiously anticipating a Christmas visit from their distant son. Also in the house are black servants and couple Sydney and Ondine, and their beautiful niece Jadine who has been educated and financially supported by Valerian and who is now a successful fashion model. One evening, after a dinner-room argument, Margaret discovers a black man hiding in her closet. To everyone’s surprise, instead of calling the police Valerian invites the dishevelled man, Son, to have dinner and stay with them. A rising attraction forms between Son and Jadine, and the resulting affair unravels a household full of long buried secrets, grievances, and unspoken expectations.

This novel took me an embarrassingly long time to get into; not because it wasn’t brilliant, I just was not in the right headspace when I started, and Morrison’s prose does not allow for inattention. Her sentences are impeccable, layered with meaning, and ripe with specificity that required my whole mind to focus. Each character is completely formed, flawed, and shown to act both from within a biased system, and from the core of their own mistakes and choices. This is not a love story, or a story about good and bad – both Jadine and Son are pretty rotten in their own way, but also understandable.

Alongside themes of racism, colonialism, womanhood and toxic masculinity, there were also interesting conversations about patronage and parenthood, and how different generational expectations can fracture relationships. What does a child owe to a parent? What does a parent owe to their children? Morrison raises many questions but does not pretend that there are easy answers to any of them.

Not an easy read but immensely rewarding.

“Rytual”, by Chloe Elisabeth Wilson

A glossy, bingeable novel about beauty, girl bosses, and the allure of cult leaders.

Marnie is lost in life; still in the early stages of grief, working a low paying and unsatisfying job at a gym, and stumbling through one-night stands and wild bar nights, she is searching for something or someone to give her life purpose. And then she is given a lifeline – the chance to work for ‘rytual cosmetica, a coveted, expensive, and mysterious beauty brand led by enigmatic Luna Peters. Everything at rytual is beautifully scented, carefully packaged, and meticulously performative in its feminist values. As Marnie glows closer to Luna, she quickly rises through the ranks and begins to learn more and more about what is really happening behind the veneer of lip oils and vetiver perfume. But once you’re this far in…can you ever get back out?

This was a fun, pulpy read with a careful balance of comedy, sci-fi, and horror. It was fast paced, designed to be inhaled rather than sipped, but it didn’t feel too rushed, or that Marnie’s fall into Luna was too quick to be believed. I would have liked to learn more about the other women working at rytual, they were all kind of blank by design to show how singularly focused the protagonist was.

Like a lot of media about cults the culpability of the participants is questioned – you didn’t see those massive red flags?! – but Wilson is careful to show the allure and comfort of Rytual, what problems a rigid and ceremonial schedule can seem to solve for someone who feels like they are losing hold of themselves. Rytual gives Marnie structure, a purpose, and a false sense of safety and community.

The romantic relationship between the two main characters didn’t ring true for me – their power dynamics were already interesting without adding sex to the mix. Perhaps if it more explicitly showed how Luna used her sexuality as a weapon to control, but for me it felt more like a “spice required” tick box rather than something integral to the themes of the novel.

This is a fun thriller to indulge in on a rainy winters day – with a cup of lavender, chamomile and rose tea of course. It’s great for the skin.

“On the Calculation of Volume: I”, by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland)

A strange, contemplative novel about time, meaning, and our impact on the world around us.

Tara Selter is trapped in time. Specifically, she is trapped in an endless loop of ‘eighteenth of November’s, with the world resetting every morning. While only she remembers the previous looped days, she begins to notice that her body and certain physical items continue to move through time, as evidenced by a healing injury on her hand and the continued presence of handwritten notes (the entries of which ostensibly become this book). She begins each day in the location and state she left the previous one, rather than resetting back in the same place each time. She had been on a work trip Paris when time begins to loop, and returning early to her husband in rural France and trying to explain her presence and her predicament repeatedly for months begins to wear at her psyche. As she begins to tire and despair, she withdraws from him and from the world. Despite her Groundhoggian nightmare she tries to hold onto optimism, and as a full year of November eighteenths approaches she searches desperately for a way to escape.

This story avoids the usual time-loop tropes this by leaning into philosophical and psychological speculation– it does not seek answers, rules, or even really a resolution. We meet Tara at a point where she no longer believes she will wake up and have this resolved. There is no problem she needs to fix, no lesson she needs to learn. She is just in the wrong day in the wrong time.

Balle’s ability to capture Tara’s mercurial moods, the dawning despair and flint-like hopefulness, is beautiful. This novel immerses you in the circularity of her days, without ever feeling repetitive, which is a grand feat.

This is the first of seven ‘volumes’ in this story (the first of five to be published, the first of two to be translated into English). I’m not entirely sure how this could be expanded for that length and still be interesting, but I am intrigued enough by the first instalment to try.