What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in January
Simon, Guardian reader
I’ve been reading Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez, which concerns Argentina in the 80s and 90s. It deals with the dictatorship and its aftermath, using horror, witchcraft and familial relationships as tools of investigation. I liked its insights into life and the way the central father/ son relationship was investigated from different angles. I found the darkness, brutality and strangeness of the novel compelling, but this was juxtaposed with moments of sweetness.
***
Zachary C Solomon, author
In a deeply surreal confluence of big life things, January saw the publication of my debut novel and the birth of my second child. As a result, my reading time has taken a nosedive; nevertheless, there have been a couple of short, smart novels propulsive enough to keep my tired eyes open just a little longer.
The first was The Cipher, speculative writer Kathe Koja’s 1991 debut novel about Nicholas, an alcoholic video store clerk, who discovers a black hole in the floor of his building’s utility room. But this isn’t one of outer space’s light-bending, time-sucking curiosities – instead, this dark spherical oddity deforms everything that it comes in contact with: bugs, mice, steel artworks, Nicholas’s hand. I am constantly disappointed by genre fiction – yet I keep trying and trying, hoping to find a novel where the sentence level is as beguiling as the premise it describes. The Cipher is one such book.
I was drawn next to the frightening literary realism of the Dutch writer Tim Krabbé and his novel The Cave. This is my first of Krabbé’s novels and, while I’m only halfway through it, I know I’ll be seeking out his others. It reminds me in all the best ways of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, a mean and perfect little book that I admire greatly. I didn’t realise until this week, however, that one of my favourite horror films, The Vanishing (the original 1988 Dutch version) was based on Krabbé’s novel of a similar name. So far, The Cave is the rare novel in which I feel both utterly lost and in the capable hands of a master storyteller.
But the truth is that, more than anything else, I’m still thinking about Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel Kairos, which I read way back in June. That’s how good it is.
• A Brutal Design by Zachary C Solomon is available now.
ᐧ***
Kate McCusker, Guardian writer
Like every other Irish person I know, I recently finished Paul Murray’s tome-heavy The Bee Sting and was after something decidedly lighter to carry around next. I picked up Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know and devoured it in one sitting.
Related: Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy – review
I’m shamefully late to the church of Levy, coming to her writing via her novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk a couple of years ago. Although I enjoyed her fiction, it was only after reading her “living autobiographies” The Cost of Living and Real Estate towards the end of last year that I really got what other people had been harping on about for so long. (My admiration was only strengthened by reading that the author is partial to a lunchtime rollie with a vermouth on ice.)
Written in response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay Why I Write, Things I Don’t Want to Know moves through a despondent working holiday to Mallorca, Levy’s childhood in apartheid South Africa and an adolescence spent performatively scrawling on napkins in a north London greasy spoon. There are so many good lines that if you took a highlighter to them the book would be cover-to-cover neon yellow. (A favourite is: “Yes, there had been many times I called my daughters back to zip up their coats. All the same, I knew they would rather be cold and free.”) On finishing it, I was less concerned with why Levy writes than just glad that she does.
***
Alun, Guardian reader
On my third attempt to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in 20 years, it just clicked into place. Sublimely written, perceptive and funny, while all fitting neatly into some well-navigated Victorian tropes.
