where you been loca
book recs about what to Where
“Why is your book set in weirdo fake 90s Italy?” my mum asked the other day (she asked it nicer than that) and I found myself, for a moment, stumbling to explain. People have been very kind about Cadenze, the setting of our upcoming novel; it has been a surprise and delight that early readers are reacting to it so viscerally, and Kirkus called it “a living, breathing entity… full of life, character, local lore, and the complicated relationships harbored by all small towns” (gulp! thanks!). That’s almost the problem; it feels so real to me now that it’s hard to imagine making it up, even though that is, of course, exactly what Onj and I did.
But setting is always a troubling beast. I find it particularly difficult, as a stranger in a strange land. “Write what you know” is boring but practical advice, and I have no instinctive setting for my fiction, perhaps because sometimes I worry I don’t know anywhere. I’m still an outsider in Berlin, my home of nearly eight years; I lived in the UK for only a handful of years; I haven’t lived properly in Australia, where I’m from, for nearly twelve years. So what do you do when you don’t know anywhere well enough? We made our somewhere up, and brought research and history and folklore as well as our own lives into it, so that if you let your eyes unfocus you’ll see Australians wandering Cadenze’s old town streets, glimpses of the British seaside deep in our Italian mountains. I don’t know how others do it, but here are some settings that I admired for their skill and depth. The kind of book that makes you surprised when you look up and realise you’re not there.
I love Sayaka Murata’s relationship with the mountains in Japan, which her writing circles around repeatedly, making landing after landing on a setting at once deeply familiar and always slightly altered. I first encountered them in her novel Earthlings; it opens with eleven-year-old Natsuki, her parents and her sister driving “up steep hairpin bends” to spend Obon with their extended family in the “mountains of Akishina”. These mountains, and the little home contained within them, are a crucial location, the safe haven from Earthlings’ condemnation of the System in the city; it’s where the narrator falls in love with her cousin, where she brings her adult husband, the source of a deep streak of the strangeness in her life. (Earthlings had a bizarre marketing campaign which positioned it as a fun, zany novel when actually it is about abuse. I don’t know how that happened, but here too, setting is central: in the city, the abusive and terrifying things that happen to Natsuki are dismissed by her family and peers as normal or untrue—in the mountains, the strange and taboo but uplifting events that take place are condemned by Natsuki’s family as horrific, disgusting. Where do you want to live, Murata asks mildly.)
But though I love Earthlings so much, this rec is actually for Murata’s short story collection LIFE CEREMONY. Bizarre, tender, unexpected, I found each story at once dizzyingly individual and also familiar, a writer stretching her legs, embroidering her internal universe. The best bit: those mountains kept coming back. The first time the mountains from Earthlings returned, along with the extended family during Obon and the incestuous cousin storyline (told you about the taboo thing), I tensed, waiting also for a repeat of the abuse… which did not arrive. Later the mountains returned without the family. Then the mountains and Granny alone. What I love so much about Life Ceremony is that it feels like Murata is inviting you inside her head: there’s something about that reuse and recycling of familiar settings, themes, images into something new every time that speaks to the idea of creativity and writing in the first place. You start to see the way authors return to something that they know and love; the way the rich ground of the mountains has all sorts of stories for Murata to tell. Each story is, on its own, singular and lovely (the first four, in particular, are a knock-out; but my favourite, “Eating the City”, arrives late) but in combination they also feel like a treat, an invitation, a gift.
(buy @ bookshop) (and here’s earthlings)PAIRS NICELY WITH: Francis Spufford’s CAHOKIA JAZZ, a book about a city that just missed out on existing. Cahokia Jazz is a hardboiled detective novel set in, you guessed it, Cahokia: a city born from an alternative history reimagining of the US, in which the great Mississippi settlement was never wiped out by the arrival of European settlers and the smallpox they brought with them. Centuries later, in the 1920s, this has turned into a city with a thriving Native American population and a boiling pot of politics, culture, race, money. Cahokia come alive so exuberantly and definitively that it’s hard to reach out of this book and remember it’s not on our maps. I loved Cahokia Jazz so much that I felt a little weak after I’d finished it; it’s the kind of page-turner where you’re begging yourself to slow down so it’s not over so quickly (and listen, it’s a Big Boy). Go into it for the city, but stay for one of the best Hero’s Journeys I’ve ever read, and for the Catholicism, and for the line “If I had a brother, he’d be precious to me”, and for Miss Chokfi. Hurry!
(Incidentally, my mum also gave me this book — shout-out to Mum for sponsoring this newsletter.)
(buy @ bookshop)CONSIDER ALSO: all your children book classics, of course, C.S. Lewis and Pat O’Shea and Jessica Miller (my new favourite is The Hotel Witch — imagine Kiki’s Delivery Service meets Eloise with that special dose of Miller magic); Kailee Pedersen’s Sacrificial Animals, for a richly rewarding Nebraska; earlier this year I went to Lisbon and then read Eça de Queiroz’s classic The Maias and felt extremely privileged to be let into all the city’s secret gossip; the Moscow in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Beginning of Spring, along with two other books I’ve spoken about before, Salt Houses and Playing for Thrills; I did not like Anne Enright’s The Green Road as much as The Gathering (which knocked me sideways), but it does have an incredible early chapter set in 1990s New York; all of the Italian books I felt so grateful to while writing Feast While You Can, including Christ Stopped at Eboli and Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales and Madonnas That Maim and Veronica Raimo’s Lost on Me and Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know and-and-and; the excellently spießig Lübeck you meet in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, especially if you know the German Ostsee and so can cackle with delight at all those scenes of Stunning Seaside Beauty; and a question for you, do you know a good London novel set between 2005-2015? Tell me about it, please.
A REMINDER: My next novel, Feast While You Can, comes out on October 24 in the UK/Commonwealth/Europe and October 29 in the US. Preorders can literally change the game for an author. If you wanted to enjoy something spooky in time for Halloween, read a big sexy lesbian love story, find out what’s going on with that weirdo faux-Italian setting and/or make me very happy, here are some links: Australia, the UK, the US, Germany (or ask our favvies), New Zealand. Thank you very much.
