ANT001 - New beginnings, entire lives & books to navigate grief
In this first edition of A Novel Tribe, I focus on books that tell the story of entire lives while my guest, Catherine Bell, shares five books that have helped her through grief.
Autumn feels like a good time for new beginnings. When measured by the seasons, our calendar New Year seems an arbitrary, middling date. In contrast, Autumn is the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The Spring/Summer season of outdoor pursuits and sun-chasing is suddenly behind us as the nights begin to get longer and the mornings more crisp. The creep towards winter feels like a time for knuckling down, for thoughtful and creative work.
So here we are, in one of those beginnings. Like the start of any endeavour on the internet, this letter feels like shouting into the void, a one way conversation about books. I hope for it to become a two way conversation with time and eventually a community, so please hit reply if you’re out there.
What makes beginnings so exciting is the unknown stretched out in front of us, the entire life of a thing. Like the first page of a book you are instantly drawn into, it crackles with possibilities. We can plan and scheme, but never quite know what will happen if we let our work take a life of its own and follow its paths.
For that reason, the theme of this first letter is books that span entire lives. Those that, more often than not, start at the beginning and finish at the end.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.
George R.R. Martin
Some are creatively structured to box time cleverly into their pages. Such as John Boyne’s The Hearts Invisible Furies. Estranged from his mother, forced to abandon him after becoming pregnant out of marriage in the hypocrisy and shame of 1940s catholic Ireland, Cyril Avery navigates his sexuality and the all-too-slowly changing attitudes towards it through an unfortunate life, both of his own doing and of ills done to him. Told in sections seven years apart, the approximate time it takes for the cells in our bodies to renew themselves, it packs an awful lot of emotional punch into a story told with fine wit and incredible pacing. Or David Nicholls’ One Day, which joins the lives of two people on a specific day (15th July, or St Swithin's Day) for twenty years. A captivating portrait of two people, it’s at once comforting and enlightening, the protagonists coming to feel like close friends.
Others are deservedly epic. So long and immersive that you really do feel as if you have lived in their world. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life springs to mind. Following four college graduates, we are slowly revealed painful and heartbreaking truths about the central character, Jude, and the wrongs done to him that have left him with unshakable trauma. Although at times a tough read - its descriptions of abuse once leaving me feeling faint on a stuffy Victoria line commute - there is enough human warmth in its brotherly loves to retain a life-affirming quality. Or Ian McEwan’s Lessons, a novel that has the feel of a magnum opus in a career already full of them. The story of how a teenage boy’s sexual relationship with his piano teacher affects his entire life, it wanders through meditations on history, art, music and seemingly everything else without wasting a single word of its 483 pages. I began, as usual, dog-earing the bottom of pages where the prose was particularly zippy or insightful but soon stopped for fear of folding every page.
The book I will focus on, however, holds no tricks and is impressive for the richly textured life it fits into less than three-hundred pages…
The tale of Marco Carrera, a man who remains unwavering in his refusal to subscribe to the belief that we should always be evolving, despite the rollercoaster of ups and downs around him, The Hummingbird - by Sandro Veronesi - is a glorious account of all of the things that matter: friendships, love, family, our inner lives, grief, stoicism, intellectual curiosity and much more. This is just one of the ways it has everything as a novel - Veronesi also effortlessly moves from tongue-in-cheek comedy to profound truths, zippy dialogue to fascinating breakdowns of language and asides on everything from Aztec beliefs and Jewish folklore to Manga authors.
There are those who strive all their life to learn, improve, move forward, conquer new heights, only to find out they were just trying to recreate the burst of energy that brought them into this world. For them, life is a full circle where starting point and end point coincide. Then there are those who - not moving at all - still manage to cover great distances, because life itself seems to glide under their feet and transport them very far from where they’d started: Marco Carrera was one of them.
Told by an active, at times opinionated, narrator (“idiots, the pair of them,” Veronesi once remarks) as well as a series of letters to both Marco’s estranged brother and his childhood love (a star crossed relationship that largely takes the form of a life-long emotional affair), it has the feel of a personal account - one told by a tipsy but charismatic friend of the family. In this strange life, the mundane becomes surreal (such as the secretive model train club known only as ‘The boys’ who inherit his deceased father’s life’s work) while the surreal feels only natural: the opening gambit of his wife’s therapist revealing she is plotting to kill him; his young daughter’s unwavering belief that there is a thread attached to her back; a childhood friend known as ‘The Omen’ who becomes a professional jinx. Even description twists and turns underneath you…
It was early on a Sunday morning and Piazza Savanarola had vanished. The trees had vanished, the sky had vanished, the cars had vanished. Nothing was there anymore. It was just like the film he’d watched with his mother over Christmas, the one where the old man gets lost in the fog outside his house: Marco Carrera was lost in the fog, right outside his house.
Veronesi’s writing (and its translation from Italian by Elena Pala) flows effortlessly, conversational yet never long-winded and full of thoughts that sow stubborn seeds in your mind. Without ever coming across self conscious, his brush strokes across a medley of themes…
Progression: “See Dad? We’re off to a very good start. The Man of the Future is a woman.” his daughter remarks at the birth of her own daughter, named Miraijin, Japanese for ‘Man of the Future’.
Mental health: Marco has aversion to ‘passive therapy’ bought on by constantly feeling he is being spoken to not by people he loves but by their therapists, failing to notice his own reliance on and growing friendship with his wife’s former therapist.
Suicide: “I wish that Irene doesn’t suicide herself,” a young Marco wishes of his sister on a shooting star.
Greed: a successful gambler, Marco remarks, “The more I won, the more I hated my life. I won fifty thousand and thought I should buy a new car because the one I have is a wreck. But I never thought my car was a wreck before.”
Parenting: This most recent read, my third, was the most touching, having recently become a father myself. “He was determined to purge his life of all the faulty elements that might sully her purity. Starting with him then… Miraijin had already begun changing the world.”
Culture: He borrows the concept of a war between truth and freedom from an essay entitled The metaphysics of populism by Rocco Ranchi, crafting it into devastatingly scathing prose on fake news, populism and the weaponisation of free speech.
And, of course, the many relationships that form a life…
It should be common knowledge - and yet it isn’t - that the course of every new relationship is set from the start, once and for all, every time; and that in order to know in advance how things will end, you only have to look at how they began. At the start of any human connection, in fact, there is always a moment of clarity where you can see it grow, stretch through time, evolve as it will evolve and end as it will end - all at once.
Any worries that this widely cast net and the meandering wisdoms caught in it might get in the way of a well told story are misplaced. The Hummingbird is remarkably easy to read for a book of such depth and never lacks for pace or intrigue, bouncing between timeframes before picking up speed to fly far into the future of generations beyond Marco and then finally return to his poignant ending. The acknowledgements, a revealing read in themselves, are testament to a book full of finely curated knowledge, yet it is told with such freewheeling abandon that it carves out a rare nook as both a deeply affecting literary feat and a subtle, emotional thriller that hooks you right from the off.
Let us pray for him, and for all the ships out at sea.
The Hummingbird - Sandro Veronesi
Five moving books to navigate grief, by content designer, Catherine Bell.
1. Time Lived, Without its Flow - Denise Riley
A mother’s account of life after her son’s death and her sense of ‘being pulled right out of time’ as grief takes hold. I found this small book – originally printed as a pamphlet – at times unbearably poignant and yet, for such an emotional subject, refreshingly cerebral. A book best read slowly in small bites.
2. Grief is the Thing With Feathers - Max Porter
A mother dies suddenly and her two young sons sit by as their father’s grief unfolds and they adjust to life without her. At a dark moment, a crow swoops in to care for them. This brilliant tale is haunting, simple and yet complicated – just like grief itself. One for grievers and non-grievers alike.
3. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
After the unthinkable sudden death of her husband, Joan Didion excavates the past, present and eventually an uncertain future alone. Although it’s written in typical Didion style – to the point, with a cool, uncanny observance – for me, this is her most affecting work; where she emerges, bare and reflective.
4. Levels of Life - Julian Barnes
This little book comprises three essays - from the heights of a hot air balloon, to the ground for a love affair, and finally, it burrows down into the depths of grief. The latter being Barnes’ unflinching account of his sorrow after the loss of his wife – the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. A complex set up, worth persevering with for the final part.
5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
Oskar Schell is a nine-year old boy with a big brain and broken heart following his father’s death in the Twin Towers. One day, he finds a key of his father’s and sets out to find the matching lock. As he roams New York, he meets a cast of intriguing characters who help him. This story has stayed with me for years – it is clever and full of heart.
Want to contribute as a guest? Just hit reply and tell me a bit about you.
Simon Sarris’ recent essay on Reading Well sums up many of my feelings about fiction reading and goes a long way to explaining why A Novel Tribe exists….
There is a kind of marinating that happens with very good works, they are always more than their story. The goal is not to digest information, but to layer over your reality with a fresh coat of moss.
Careful descriptions and summaries miss too much of the world. Hard distinctions make bad philosophy. Reading fiction helps you become an unsystematic thinker, something that is equally valuable but more elided by some engineers. It is easy to maintain an intellectual rigidity. It takes more care to maintain a loose poeticism of thought.
Jeanette Winterson with a lovely Guardian feature titled Why I Adore the Night.
I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.
Morgan Housel challenges us to ask a series of important questions of ourselves in I Have a Few Questions
How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)? They’re hard to tell apart without hindsight.
Drummer and composer Yussef Dayes, a cult figure in the London jazz scene he’s helped revitalise, recently released his first solo album - Black Classical Music. A nineteen track journey of intricate, afro & hip-hop influenced compositions and rapid fire drumming that’s well worth your full attention.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first edition and found something to interest or inspire you. I’d love to hear feedback or any thoughts and contributors are always welcome, so please don’t hesitate to reply to this email.
Until next time,
MQ.