Entries tagged with genre: literary fiction

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Recent Reading: Our Wives Under the Sea

Latest commute audiobook: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. This novel is about a woman, Miri, whose wife is a marine biologist, and goes on a submarine expedition for work meant to last three weeks. Six months later, Leah's sub finally resurfaces, but she isn't the same person Miri remembers.

This is another WIN for online queer recs - I thoroughly enjoyed it. I may even buy a copy for myself. There is a horror element to this story—for Miri, our primary narrator, the horror of watching someone you love become something you don't recognize or understand—but mostly Our Wives Under the Sea is a meditation on grief and loss. It is so easy to transform this story into a metaphor for anyone with a loved one who is terminally ill, or missing, or otherwise there, but not there.

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The Annotated Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf with foreword and annotations by Merve Emre

Perhaps a slightly strange entry for this comm, but I imagine there's crossover interest.

This is a new(ish) hardback annotated + illustrated edition of Mrs Dalloway from Norton, with contextual annotations and critical foreword added by literary scholar Merve Emre, but aimed at a non-scholarly audience. Everyone should obviously read Mrs Dalloway, but this is a review of the annotated edition, rather than the novel per se.

I had bought this annotated edition as a gift for a family member, but I went ahead and read it before I wrapped it up. The verdict: okay! Probably quite satisfying for non-academics. I personally thought the balance was off between footnotes I welcomed which explained particular political/historical happenings relevant to the text, gestured towards interesting academic readings, and compared draft histories and the development of specific passages, and footnotes which, literally, explained over the course of two full page-margins what Big Ben is. I'm just pretty sure people reading a $35 USD hardback annotated Mrs Dalloway on purpose are going to know what Big Ben is, and I would rather know more about what changes were made to the character of Rezia. However! There were annotations of the nature I preferred, and I definitely learned some interesting things, including scholars whose work I would like to look at more closely. I do also want to give Emre significant credit for not toeing the Hermione Lee party line and giving sexual assault and abuse their rightful place in these annotations, both as an element of the novel and as an element of Woolf's personal history.

This edition is also a beautiful book-object, full of lovely illustrations and photographs. I thought the paper stock was a good thickness and the cover was pretty. Definitely a great gift book for the right person.

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The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories, ed. Margaret Reynolds

This is a 420 page doorstop of a book, containing just under a century's worth of prose. The first story is Sarah Orne Jewett's Martha's Lady (1897); the last, Jeanette Winterson's The Poetics of Sex (1993). Despite the title, not everything in here is a short story - there's an extract from Beebo Brinker, and part of a lecture by Virginia Woolf.

It sits very much at the literary end of things, often wandering off into the downright experimental, and I sometimes felt that it took itself a little too seriously. But it took its contents seriously, too, and it was pleasing to see facsimile reproductions of parts of The Ladies' Almanack (which I'm sure is hilarious if one knew any of the ladies) and a comic strip by Alison Bechdel. I'd be really interested to see what might be included in an updated edition.

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Devoted Ladies (Molly Keane)

In my head I keep a list of Awkward Party Scenes in Queer Lit, and Devoted Ladies has swept into the top three. It comes in below Curious Wine, because at least there are no excruciating party games you can't opt out of, but above The Charioteer, because the horrible dynamics of other people's relationships are played out in public. Although at least it's over quicker and you have a hope of working out what's going on.

Devoted Ladies opens with this Awkward Party Scene - and partner abuse. Jessica chucks a bottle at Jane. And things don't really improve. It's particularly unsatisfying from a Queer Lit point of view since, in addition to the above, ( spoilers for the entire book )

This is one of those books where absolutely everybody is absolutely horrible. Like Mapp and Lucia but much less good-natured. I enjoyed the cynical take on bohemian London, and the self-deprecating portrait of the writing process (the author gives her own books cameos, and isn't very polite about them). I also enjoyed the contrast between bohemian London and the decaying Anglo-Irish aristocracy. (Oh, there's also a fox-hunting scene, which may be a deal-breaker for some.) But I really wouldn't recommend it to someone who was after something cheerful and queer-positive.

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Clio Rising (Paula Martinac)

A historical novel with two layers: the narrator, Livvie, goes to New York in the 1980s to find a job and the lesbian scene. The job puts her in contact with Clio Hartt, a giant of the lesbian literary coterie in 1930s Paris and author of The Dismantled, but now living alone in a Greenwich Village apartment.

The Dismantled is a classic, but Clio has published nothing since. Livvie's job is to try to get Clio writing again, which seems to lead inevitably into digging into her past to find out why she stopped writing in the first place. I enjoyed (and occasionally cringed) Livvie's attempts to find out, but the big twist behind this felt a bit like a fuss about nothing to me. I couldn't quite buy it on an emotional level.

Livvie's relationship drama tended to come second to her investigation of Clio's past. This worked for me, if only because I wasn't massively invested in it, and I rather liked the low-key way in which it played out.

I enjoyed the evocation of 1980s New York, and the contrast with Livvie's Southern background. My own preference would have been for a little more inter-war Paris, though that's purely personal, and the structure worked well as it was.

There was some period-typical but narratively unnecessary biphobia, and also some kink-shaming (pretty mild kink, at that) which again felt gratuitous.

I ought to have loved this one, dealing as it does with settings that I find fascinating, but overall it fell a bit flat for me.

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Almost-Friday review: My Real Children by Jo Walton

I missed Friday by a day, but it's the first day of Pride Month so I figured I'd make this post now rather than waiting 'til next Friday.

Review of My Real Children by Jo Walton at my DW.

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The King of a Rainy Country (Brigid Brophy) and a fic rec

Novel: The King of a Rainy Country; fic: Saffy's Secret (Casson Family series)

ETA: link now points to my review, sorry!